How to Use The Donut Chef in the Classroom

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The Donut Chef Activities

📝 This post, The Donut Chef, was originally published in 2013 and has been updated with new information and resources.

I discovered The Donut Chef  by Bob Staake at the library one day when I was actually looking for another one of his books. I LOVE his books, so the minute I saw this one, I knew I had to take it home to read to my boys.

While reading it to my oldest, my teacher brain immediately started spinning with ideas! So the very next day, I set aside my plans for my first graders, read the book to them, and followed it with some super fun math and writing activities.

The Donut Chef by Bob Staake

The Donut Chef  is a fun story about a donut chef who is always looking for ways to make his donuts bigger, better, and more unusual—especially when a competing donut shop opens across the street.

The book gave us the perfect jumping-off point for talking, creating, writing, graphing, and even a little math.

Create Your Own Donut

We talked about donuts, shared our favorite kinds, and graphed our class favorites. Students then created their own paper donuts, choosing the shape, flavor, frosting, and toppings. I even made a paper donut box to hold all of their creations so we could use them for some of our other activities!

Dozen, Half Dozen, and Baker’s Dozen

Once all of the donuts were finished, each student shared their creation with the class.

Then we used our paper donuts to explore the meaning of a dozen, half dozen, and baker’s dozen.

We counted and grouped the donuts to make:

🍩 Half dozen = 6
🍩 Dozen = 12
🍩 Baker’s dozen = 13

Having the paper donuts right there made these terms much more concrete for my first graders—and gave us another way to use the donuts they had created.

Exploring Fractions with Donuts

We also used our collection of paper donuts to explore fractions. This was a bit beyond where my first graders were at the time, so we kept it pretty informal. With older students, you could take the fraction practice much further using questions like:

🍩 What fraction of the donuts have sprinkles?
🍩 What fraction of the donuts are round?
🍩 What fraction are long?
🍩 What fraction are chocolate?

The possibilities will depend on the donuts your students create, which makes the activity different every time!

Donut Descriptive Writing

After all that math, we moved on to writing.

I shared something I had noticed with my students: whenever they described how something tasted, they tended to use the word “good.”

But what does good actually taste like? What does it mean- specifically?

We talked about how the word good doesn’t give the reader very much information. Then we brainstormed better words we could use to describe how a donut might taste.

We even pulled out a good old-fashioned thesaurus and had a quick lesson on what it is and how to use it!

Once we had our list of descriptive words, students glued their paper donuts onto a piece of paper and wrote a sentence describing how their donut tasted without relying on the word good.

It turned a simple donut craft into a great little lesson on word choice and descriptive writing.

 

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Bring The Donut Chef to Your Classroom

The resource includes the donut craft, graphing, fractions, descriptive writing, and dozen activities shared in this post, plus a few more ways to extend the learning with a donut glyph, menu creation, and word search.

💚 Grab The Donut Chef Activities from TPT.

A Sweet Way to Mix Math and Writing

What started as an unexpected library find turned into one of those teaching days where I tossed aside my original plans and just ran with an idea—and I’m glad I did!

The kids loved creating their donuts, and I loved how easily one picture book led us into graphing, number concepts, fractions, vocabulary, and descriptive writing.

Definitely one I would do again!