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Outstanding Independent Elementary School Teacher

Edible Maps and More
Ashley Davis’s quest for memorable learning tactics

When third-grade teacher Ashley Davis was planning her U.S. geography unit this year, she knew she wanted to make it fun. And educational. And memorable.

She succeeded—with 3-D edible maps.

“They learned where everything was, but they also had to apply it,” Davis, 27, said of her students.

Within the all-girls Hewitt School, where Davis has taught for two years, the edible maps quickly became the stuff mythology is made of.

Head of school Linda MacMurray Gibbs praised Davis as an “innovative” teacher, and when asked for examples, the first thing that came to mind was the 3-D map project.

Davis first used the edible map lesson a few years ago in her second grade classroom in Raleigh, N.C., with peanut butter cookie dough. When she came to the Hewitt School in 2005, nuts were the biggest obstacle to repeating the project. The Upper East Side school has a ban on nuts, because of increasing numbers of students with nut allergies.

Then Davis found a nut-free dough and, bingo: Her lesson plan was complete.

Each girl in her class shaped a nub of dough into a roughly 8?-by-11 footprint of the United States. Then they added the geographical features: Twizzlers were the rivers; yellow sprinkles showed Death Valley and green sprinkles covered the Great Plains. Volcanoes were crafted from marshmallows, and chocolate chips were mountain peaks.

That her students are still young enough to get truly excited by hands-on projects is one of the reasons Davis enjoys teaching third grade. But she also enjoys helping to build the girls’ intellect.

“Between the beginning of the year and the end of the year, you can see a lot of growth,” she said.

One skill she has especially enjoyed teaching this year is how to infer. In reading group, Davis first made sure her students understood how to recognize literal information: “Literal is what’s written right there,” she said she would tell the class.

Then she would say that to look for inferential information you have to pretend that you are a detective. You have to use the literal information “to create an educated guess,” Davis said.

Years from now, Davis’ students may not remember when and how they learned to infer. But earlier this month, students at the Hewitt School publicly shared their favorite memories from the school year. Among Davis’ third-graders—you guessed it—“Edible maps is right up there,” Davis said.

— Michal Lumsden