She's back

Hi everyone,

I guess you're all thinking I fell off the face of the planet, and I guess that's somewhat true since I've been drowning in graduate school work, student teaching, substitute teaching, tutoring, and all the other fun stuff life hands me. But, I've decided it's time to get back on the blog horse since we'll be back into a new school year soon.
My first post back is a little project I finished up this week for a job I'm interviewing for, and I thought it turned out well, so why not share it?! This is a lesson I did with the 5th grade class I've worked with throughout the year as a substitute teacher, and one of my favorite groups of kids. They just started a unit on environment sciences, so I asked their teacher if I could crash the class and talk about decomposition and waste. They seemed to really enjoy the activities and video, and the exit tickets I got that day had some GREAT follow up questions, so I'd say it was a success. Hope you enjoy.

Fun with Force & Motion

We've just finished up our physical science unit on force and motion and it’s been a while since I've posted so I thought I’d pop in and write a quick update. As you can imagine, we are up to our ears in end-of-year assessments, tests, rehearsals, and classroom clean up. With so many things on the to-do list, it was difficult to get through all of the physics that we’d planned, but we made it.

In my online quest for fun experiments to supplement my unit, I came across this wonderful comprehensive physics packet. Got to love freebie shares online, right? Anyway, this thing is full of goodies including one of my favorites, the balloon rocket race. Last year, I did this one during St. Paddy’s Day with little leprechauns and they LOVED it, so it was nice to be able to tie it in to our science theme this go round.

All you need for this activity are balloons, string, straws, and a bit of tape. Here’s how it works:

• Find a start line in your classroom (about 8 feet from the wall).
• Measure one piece of string (I used fishing line) and tape the end to the wall.
• Give each student one piece of string, a balloon, and a small piece of straw.
• After the balloon is blown up, tape the small straw to the side and feed the string through it.
• Hold the balloon tight to not let the air out and grab the string with the other hand.
• Once everyone has a fully inflated balloon and a grip on their string, start the countdown and remind them to hang on to the string as they release the balloon.

If you want to turn it into a little competition, have the winners from each round go on to the finale.

If you have any other super fun experiments to share, leave a comment for me so I can add it to my list. Thanks and have a great week!

Color Acrostics

With a million and one things to still do before school lets out next week, I completely forgot to post these bad boys, but I definitely like how the lesson went, so better late than never… I think that’s my slogan these days.

Anyway, as part of our introduction to poetry last month we did acrostic poems with colors as a theme rather than the traditional name poems. I like doing acrostic poems, but I find that they are generally too easy for my 6^th graders. I decided this year to try to challenge them to come up with something more abstract. Each of them drew a color from the hat, brainstormed words to describe that color, then scoured a stack of old magazines for items to match. Here’s what we came up with!

Parts of Speech- Notebook Activity

Here’s a fun grammar activity (if there is such a thing) that we did last week when we were reviewing parts of speech…

Now, I have to admit that grammar is not always my strongest subject to teach for a couple of reasons; a) I learned it well over 20 years ago, b) I don’t know all the rules by heart yet, c) it doesn't always make a lot of sense in my brain, and d) there’s always a thousand different ways to say the same thing in English. It can be really frustrating and confusing for me so I can only imagine the torture it must feel like to my mostly ESL students.

I started the lesson by playing this catchy little number to hook them in and then we listened a second time, making sure to pause and jot down notes in our notebooks. Once we made our way through the 8 parts of speech, I turned them loose with a stack of old magazines in the craft corner and sent them on a scavenger hunt for all the different parts of speech we just learned. Here’s a copy of the simple table I made for their notebooks and a few examples from my students so you have a visual. 

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•     They didn't get them all accurate, but they really tried. Guess we’ll be revisiting these again this week J

    If you have a different method that’s been more effective for teaching parts of speech, please leave me a tip. I’ll take all the help I can get!

Sensory Poems

This is the second year that I’ve done sensory poems, and possibly one of my all-time favorite lessons. The kids love it, and it’s such a great way to teach rich, descriptive writing… something that most of my students struggle with. By isolating the senses one by one, they are really challenged to find words to describe how something sounds, feels, smells, feels, sounds, or tastes and then find ways to convey that to a reader. It’s truly phenomenal what they come up with during this exercise.

Last year I used a couple of different stimuli than this year, but it was just as successful. In fact, that’s the beauty of this lesson; you can use whatever you have access to, to bring this to life. Here is what I did:

First, I introduced the word “sensory,” which most of them were unfamiliar with. I wrote it in caps in the middle of the white board and asked what they thought it meant. Give them a minute with this because you will usually have one brave soul who offers up the word “senses.” Once you've got that, they generally know the 5 senses. Add the five senses to your mind map on the board around your middle “sensory” word. Then, one by one, add adjectives under each of the senses until you feel like they get it. Then explain that you’ll be making poems using these 5 senses. You will see the excitement start to rise when they realize they will get to eat something. Naturally, you have to keep that one for the finale to hold their interest, but you get the point here.


I started with "sound." I played this youtube clip for them from my desk so they weren't able to see the screen. After the clip, I told them to write down words or phrases in their writer’s notebook that they think of when they hear this sound, and to go beyond naming it.

Next, I played this clip on the overhead projector without sound and asked them add it to their writer’s notebook page under “see.”

The next sense I did was “touch.” For this one, I got a boa from our drama room and told them to close their eyes while they held and squeezed it. Last year, I used sand and ice for touch- all were good.

The next one was “smell,” which I did with a eucalyptus scented essential oil. This one was hard for them, so I might suggest a strong smelling flower or more recognizable smell like cinnamon.

Lastly, I sent around a bowl of freshly popped popcorn for them to take a handful of for “taste.”

As a class we went through some of the descriptors that they came up with and I shared a poem I wrote about apples. Then, I turned them loose to choose one of the 5 stimuli we just experienced and create a sensory poem about it.

I’ll post a couple of their finished poems when I get back to school tomorrow. Until then, enjoy what’s left of your weekend, and go indulge in a good meal with all your senses! 

Book Page Art Poems

I've seen variations of this project floating around on pinterest for quite some time now and thought it would be a perfect addition to our poetry unit (although it could be adapted to other areas of language arts). We all have a book or two that is beyond salvageable our classroom or library right? Well, don’t be so quick to throw them out because they can be turned into these beautiful works of art quite easily.

For ours, I had a really old, worn out copy of The Wind in the Willows that I used as a course book last year. I picked this particular copy up at a used bookstore when I was home for Christmas last year; I think I may have spent a whole dollar on it. 

Anyway, it was in rough shape so I tore several pages out and told the students to take a couple of pages and search for words that stood out that could make a poem and circle those words lightly in pencil. It was not an easy task for everyone, but I liked watching them struggle a bit with the challenge. Is that bad? Of course I was there to help them along, but I really wanted them to start thinking about poetry in a different context. Some of them are stuck in the it-has-to-rhyme stage and I wanted to help them see beyond that.

Once the words were found, I showed them a few examples of recycled book art and let them choose the style they liked best. I put a basket of glitter pens, black fountain pens, and chalk out for them to experiment with on their pages, and here’s what they came up with.

Pretty awesome, right? I highly recommend this one!

Door Decorations

Ok, this post is about 2 months overdue, but I had to share it before I forgot. Here’s a picture of the door decoration that my kids and I did during our ancient civilizations unit. I was pretty pleased with how it came out considering I put a group of 12 year olds on the project.

And finally, here’s the last door decoration for the school year. My kids came up with the idea to use an interactive facebook and twitter door to say goodbye to classmates, younger students, and teachers. We created fake profile pages here and even tied a pencil to the door so people in the hallway could leave a tweet with their well wishes. We’re proud of how it turned out.