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.

Restaurant Math Project

It’s hard to believe the end of the school year is less than a month away now. This time of year is always met with a mix of feelings, from exhaustion and burnout to excitement and pride. I have the pleasure of teaching the oldest bunch of kids at my school so it always feels doubly emotional. It’s going to be difficult to say goodbye to this group in particular because they’re such a small class and we’ve gotten very close throughout the school year… It’s how I imagine a parent feels when they wake up and realize their baby is all grown up. Kind of.

Anyway, I wanted to end the year with a fun math project, but wasn’t struck with any bright ideas. I searched all of my favorite teaching blogs, pinterest, and even google, but nothing stood out. Eventually I came across this cool restaurant math activity that was a bit below my students’ abilities, but still helpful for introducing real-life math. Doing this activity with my students gave me the idea to have them design their own “restaurants” complete with menus, pricing, and even a 3D design in Google Sketch-up. The kids are SUPER excited about this because they love all things food related.

The project starts with a proposal to me about which type of restaurant they’d like to open (coffee shop, deli, pizza parlor, taco stand, etc.). Once approved, they have to put together some delicious menu items with descriptive language and appropriate pricing. Now, we’re in Vietnam so I let them choose which currency they’d like to use, but this is easily adaptable for any location. In fact, for an added challenge, you could tell students where their restaurant location is and have them work with currency conversions to complete this project. Later, after the menu and pricing is set, the students will make a corresponding worksheet with word problems that relate to their menu. Each student will need to submit 10 problems (addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, discounts/percentages, rounding, and estimation) that classmates will have to solve. Finally, each student will bring in one menu item and a printed copy of their menu to share with the class. This will be our final party of the year, and one that I hope they remember for a long time.

Here’s the slideshow that I made with the project guideline if you’d like to use this as a model in your class. Happy Monday to all my stateside friends!

Here's another helpful site for more restaurant math!

Haiku- Mixed Media Art Journals

Well, we’re a couple weeks into our poetry unit here, and things are going great. We covered the elements of poetry and have now ventures into the thick of it with acrostic, concrete, and haiku poems. I wanted to share our haiku project from today because I was really impressed with their effort on this one.

It’s not every day that your students can grasp a concept like subtlety, and then show you that they GET IT. It is a beautiful thing, my friends. Anyway, so after we learned a little about the history and structure of haikus, we split the class into different seasons and started brainstorming ways to describe nature in those seasons. Then, once we felt like we had enough descriptive words down, they went to work making their own seasonal haikus.

Later for art, we looked at some really great examples of mixed media and art journal pages so they could get a visual of what our goal was, and started exploring with texture, color, and technique. I allowed them to use any medium that we’d worked with this year, including drawing/sketching, painting (watercolor & acrylic), doodling, collage, stenciling, and sponging. I had to keep reminding them that mistakes could be covered, and that layers were what make mixed media so cool. Once they got that, the awesomeness started to emerge… Check out s couple of them below. Have a splendid weekend!

Spring!

Summer!

Winter!

Fall coming soon!

Mother's Day Poems

Happy Friday, everyone! Well, at least for those of us living in Asia. It’s May and the rainy season is upon us once again, which means I’ll be sporting wet shoes and a poncho for the next couple of months. It really makes me miss having a vehicle with doors and a roof, but hey, it’s just water, right?

This weekend is Mother’s Day, and coincidently, we’ve just started our poetry unit, so I thought- what better way celebrate mom than with a beautiful poem? In language arts we’ve been learning about figurative language, specifically similes and metaphors, so we read some poems that use figurative language just to get some ideas. Then, we brainstormed a list of adjectives that we use to describe our moms.

Later for art, we created a watercolor floral border to publish out poems on… I got the idea for this project here. Here’s a few snapshot of our pieces today.

Happy Mom’s Day to all you fierce females out there. Hope you have a great weekend!

Start with watercolor- be sure to leave a space for your poem!

Any color combo will do...

Once it dries, draw over it with a fine-tip permanent marker or fountain pen (0.5mm)

It's up to you how light or dark the flowers.

Add the final draft of your poem.

Voila! Mother's Day Gift, boss status.

Travel Video Project-update

Hey there! If you can’t visit Paris or Greece, why not bring it to you? That was what we decided to do last month with our travel videos. This was a great activity to tie in our unit on geography, but there were so many cross-curricular opportunities here with language arts, technology, and social studies.

I just wanted to post a quick update on the project now that they are up and published. Click here to find the project guideline and rubric.

We’ve been putting the finishing touches on our videos and editing them for publishing. Unfortunately, I’m not a whiz with video editing or iMovie so I wasn’t able to give as much assistance and instruction as I would have liked, but I think we did ok. I was more interested in how they would compile and present their research than anything else, and in that respect, I think they did pretty well. Here are a couple of our videos if you want to check them out.

Here's the example video I created from last summer's trip to Greece.

Nhu's travel video on Espana!!!

Minh Chi's France video.

Back in Time- Class Museum Project

WOW, what a week it has been over here! We’ve just finished up our final unit project on ancient civilizations with a way too big museum exhibit for the entire school. It was a heck of a lot of work, but we’ve received some great feedback from all of our visitors- we even made it onto the school website, so I thought I’d share it in a post here.

For this unit, we’ve been focusing on the ancient Egyptians and their daily lives in class. Additionally, the kiddos chose their own ancient civilizations to research about to create a FULL-BLOWN history museum exhibit. They had to find relevant details about the history and culture of their chosen civilizations and display their findings in the form of a museum exhibit, complete with ancient artifacts. Here are the guidelines that I gave to them weeks ago. Last Wednesday, each class in the school was assigned a time slot and given admission (raffle) tickets to visit our newly remodeled classroom that was transformed into a museum!!!

Here are a few snapshots of our big day… If you have any pointers or want to know more in detail what I did, feel free to leave a comment.

Hope you are surviving what’s left of the school year. 6 more weeks on this end, and the official countdown has begun. Cheers- Happy Friday!

All dressed up and ready to go

All about the Egyptians

Minh Chi reporting live from ancient Rome

Winnie in ancient Greece

Nhu teaching about ancient China

Tell THIS story

It’s assessment time again, and I was looking for something different to assign for my writing assessment this semester other than the usual “here’s your topic.” I’ve always loved using picture prompts for writing because so many of us are visual learners, and it’s neat to see how the same picture can elicit such a variety of stories. In my quest for bizarre and interesting picture prompts, I stumbled onto a slideshare that was created with 150 awesome pictures for story writing. (Thank you, Kevin Cummins)Some of them were so good that it was hard for my students to choose which story they wanted to tell. It’s so nice when an assessment doesn’t feel like an assessment, isn’t it?

So, if you’re looking to put a little spin on your next writing assessment, or if you are just looking for a fun task board or class writing assignment, give this one a try. Your students will love it!

150 Amazing Writing prompts Pictures from Kevin Cummins

Paint like an Egyptian

Last week’s art lesson was too good not to post… As you know, we’ve been studying ancient civilizations, specifically the ancient Egyptians, and what unit would be complete without a look at the influence of art?

Because the ancient Egyptians were the first to introduce written language through hieroglyphics and because the symbolism used by the Egyptians is relatively easy to replicate, I decided to let it guide us through art last week. I found this lesson over at Ms. Picasso’s art room. Check it out here. Here’s what we did:

Find a god/goddess-inspired picture that you like and transfer the image with pencil onto a nice, thick piece of paper. You can also add a couple of hieroglyphic symbols around the picture just to jazz it up. After your drawing is complete, trace over the pencil with a black permanent marker. * Make sure you use permanent marker or else it will bleed later on when you add watercolor* Once your black marker outline is complete, sponge paint over it with brown, yellow, and/or orange acrylic paints until it looks old. Finally, once the acrylic paints have dried, apply just a splash of watercolor to a few parts of the piece… be sure not to overdo it with the color as you want it to look as authentic as possible. Here are a few of our completed pieces. I think they turned out great, what do you think?

 

 

Ancient Egypt Lapbook

Sorry about my absence, folks. It’s been a whirlwind of a week here with history, literacy month, field trips, and upcoming parent-teacher conferences. I don’t have a whole lot of time to post this, but I really wanted to share these super awesome lapbooks that we started last week for our unit on ancient civilizations. I got the idea here, and adapted it a bit to meet the needs of my own classroom.

What I love about lapbooks and foldables is that they are fun and engaging for even the most hesitant of learners. I find that when you leave it up to them to be the researcher, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what stuff they come up with. Plus, these projects make for the perfect lesson on summarization and being concise with language because there’s not a lot of writing space available. This forces them to ask themselves essential questions like Is this information relevant? and Is this information important?

In my class, we divided up the research into categories- new vocabulary, daily life, religion, mummies, pyramids, geography, Nile, hieroglyphics, and jobs. Then, we all took a category and went to work researching and collecting data in our theme notebooks. Once we were done researching, we came together as a class and shared our findings, being sure to sift out the “meaty” bits that we’d copy into our lapbooks. We aren’t quite finished with them yet, but they are really coming together nicely and I wanted to share this small victoryJ I hope you’re all enjoying your week. Check out the pictures below!

 

Ancient Civilization Project

Hello and welcome back to another busy week. We’ve had a week of professional development and planning, so it has been non-stop here. I wanted to share a few things I’ve been working on starting with our upcoming history unit on ancient civilizations.

For the next 5 weeks we’ll be taking an in-depth look at ancient times and the early civilizations that changed our world forever. We will explore their daily lives through stories, media, science, and technology to come up with our very own museum exhibit that will be on display for schoolmates, teachers, and staff. Check out the digital guidelines that I created on sliderocket.com and a little treat from the 80’s. Have a great week!

 

If you haven't used sliderocket yet, give it a try. It's super easy to use and fun to work with.

You know you want to!

FIS Olympics

Happy Spring Break to all of you out there who actually get one. We have a non-pupil week here, but hey, I’ll take what I can get at this point. At least I’ll be ready to take on the rest of the school year, right? Well it has been a brutal couple of weeks here trying to wrap things up before break, but we made it.

Last week we held our annual school Olympics complete with a cheer contest, relay races and one mean tug-of-war finale. Of all the events that we do throughout the year, this one seems to be the crowd favorite. And this year was no exception, despite the heat, everyone had a great time.

Here are some highlights from the events: