It’s peanut butter jelly time!
Elementary school teachers have found a creative way to teach through food.
Kayleigh Sloan, who instructs creative writing for first and second graders, decided to make sandwiches based on her students’ instructions for preparing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
As you might guess, it got quite messy.
A TikTok video of this idea has gone viral, amassing 53 million views. In it, Sloan poses a question to her class:
“The first one says – you got bread, you got peanut butter, you got jelly. Did I make it?” Students immediately replied with a chorus of “no,” insisting, “That’s not how you do it!”
Next, she read another instruction, which directed her to “flat the bread.”
“Well, it’s pretty flat. I think it looks good,” she replied, pushing the bread down onto the table.
Continuing, she followed the next step, which said to “spread the jelly and jam” on the bread, and then proceeded to do just that, generating a mix of laughter and gasps from the students.
One particularly vocal student exclaimed, “That’s not how you make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!” to which Sloan countered, “That’s what I said I was going to do.”
As the lesson progressed, another student instructed her to “put on her peanut butter,” which led Sloan to apply the messy ingredients even to her own arm after jokingly asking the kids to wait.
“Well, it’s on—am I finished?” she asked, amusing the students with her antics.
With laughter in the air, someone piped up, “You’re doing it wrong!”
Sloan emphasized that they had just spent the entire lesson adding detail to their writing.
“Why don’t you mention plates or knives? I was literally following your instructions,” she explained to her class.
The students seemed genuinely surprised by the results, as Sloan shared in an interview.
“Words matter; they can change everything. I was basically doing what you told me,” she noted, reinforcing the importance of details.
This annual lesson appears to work like a charm for Sloan every year.
