School | Chocomundo Field Trip

I wanted to pause the Israel posts for a minute and jump to our recent field trip because these pictures are so cute! When Fernanda and I started thinking about what we were going to do for our field trip this year, she came across Chocomundo, an exploration into the growth, production, and consumption of chocolate geared towards early elementary students. While we thought it would be interesting based on the website, this experience way exceeded our expectations for the kids! The leaders were engaging and entertaining throughout the WHOLE day. If you haven't been in a room full of twenty children around six years old, let me just say that keeping their full attention for a six hour period is quite a feat.

We learned about the cocoa plant (which takes a whopping seven years to grow), where it comes from, how it is harvested, and the process it goes through to become the delicious treat that we know and love! They had a cocoa fruit preserved in a jar that the kids got to take a closer look at as well as some raw dried cocoa to smell.

We visited Montezuma's domain where he explained the origins of chocolate in Mexico, why it was once used as a currency, and how the Europeans pillaged the Aztec empire's supply. We also learned that Marie Antoinette was the first to suggest that sugar be added to chocolate (drink).

Then, it was time for us to mask up and get ready to make our own chocolate!

Overall, this was probably the most engaging field trip I have been on in my teaching career and it was great to see that several days later, the kids could recall the information they learned. How do I know? Montezuma isn't normally a word you would find in the vocabulary of a five year old. If you have little ones in the São Paulo area, I would definitely recommend a visit to Chocomundo!