Word Clouds- 100 days

As the 100^th day of school approaches, I’ve been brainstorming all of the different ways that I can incorporate 100 into my lessons. I’ve seen about a million ideas online, but they all seem to be a bit too young for my 6^th graders. I’ve been looking for an excuse to have my class play around with tagxedo.com because I just love word clouds and have been using the site to make one for each week’s spelling words and hanging on our word wall.

So… I decided why not have the students come up with 100 words that they would use to describe themselves and put it in the form of a word cloud. I found that the task was just the right amounts of challenge and fun to make it a 100-day-worthy activity. Plus, this makes for a great computer task board station. Try it out with your class or play around with it just for fun. Enjoy!

Digital Citizenship

Last week in ICT we did a lesson that we should have done at the very beginning of the year… Digital Citizenship. But like they say, it’s better late than never, right?

Digital Citizenship such an important concept for kids these days because they have access to EVERYTHING on the net and well, there’s a lot of bad stuff out there. Especially important is this idea that you leave a digital footprint when you post anything online. A lot of people don’t truly understand what that means in today’s world. The things we post can be checked when applying for jobs and college, which can seriously help or hurt our chances. For this lesson, I found a really great post on edmodo that was a slideshow with video clips and a short quiz. The slideshow was created by Michele Alvarez (thanks, Michele!) using a website called mentormob.com, which I’ve never heard of but am very excited to explore. Check out her creation here:

 

After my students completed the slideshow, I had them create a short animated video on animoto.com about digital citizenship to show me that they understood what it meant. Here’s one of my students’ videos on digital citizenship. Hope you’re having a great weekend and happy browsing!
 

 

Student-led art lessons

One of the things that I love about teaching older kids is the level of projects that they can handle. Their creative minds are so open to trying new ideas and exploring new options. It’s so cool to see what they come up with.

This month, in keeping with the geography theme, I’ve assigned a neat project for art that allows them to be the teacher. Basically, they have to choose a famous artist, time period, or piece of art and teach the other students about it. Then, they do a demonstration on how to re-create that style and that’s our art lesson for the week. Today’s the first student art lesson, so I’ll let you know how it goes… Here are the guidelines and rubric that I made for this project. Have a great weekend everyone!

Art Project Guidelines

Interactive World Map

Holy Moly, where do the weeks go? Sorry I’ve been missing for a while. We’ve jumped in head-first into our geography theme unit and I haven’t had time to catch my breath. Speaking of geography, here’s a little somethin’ that I’m doing with the kiddos this month as a homework/taskboard tie in with the theme.

I drew up this large world map on a sheet of butcher paper, making sure to not include anything except the outline of the continents. Then, I created these little daily geography activities and put them in an envelope ranging from drawing and labeling countries to locating mountain ranges to writing a journal entry from an early explorer’s perspective…the possibilities are virtually endless for this theme. Anyway, every day the kids choose one activity from the envelope to complete either for homework or during task board time. Then, we discuss our findings as a class and a couple of them transfer it from their homework onto the big map and color it in. At the end of the week, we have a short online quiz through edmodo over the content that they learned. It’s been pretty successful so far and they seem to be retaining most of what they’re learning, so I’m happy.

In addition, we've been working on a couple of interesting geography projects and gearing up for our math day competition at the end of the month. Needless to say things have been busy. Here are a few pictures of our interactive map board and the activity sheet I created if you’d like to try it in your class. Happy almost Friday, everyone!

Candy Averages

What a busy week it’s been already! We’ve jumped right in after break and I did a really fun math lesson, so I thought I’d share.

We’ve started our unit on averages, and to bribe ease the kids back into the swing of things, we did candy math! Ok, so this is SO not part of the New Year’s resolution, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, right? This is such a fun lesson, but it can be a costly one if you’ve got a big class. Keep in mind that you can adapt this one into group or partner work to cut back on the cost though. Here’s how it works:

1)     Pass out a data collection sheet to each student (or student group). Click here to snag a copy of the one that I made for this lesson.

2)     Get a small bag of M&M’s for each student (or student group) and tell them to estimate how many candies are in the bag before touching or opening them.

3)     Of their estimated total, have them then guess how many of each color will be found in their bag.

4)     Once all estimations are made, have the students open their bags and record the actual amounts.

5)     Then, have them review their percentage and graphing skills to put their data into a pie chart and/or bar graph.

6)     Lastly, enjoy a tasty treat… even if math is at 8am, you won’t hear any complaints.

I will snap a picture of the bar graphs that we created in our math journals with this data and post it later. Until then, happy humpday!

New Year, new theme... geography

I don’t know about you, but the holiday break was just what I needed after the busy first semester. I’m feeling rejuvenated and ready to take on the new year and was even lucky enough to spend the holidays with my mom. How can you beat that?

Anyway, today was my first day back and I got straight to work on the plan for the new theme unit on geography. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this theme because I’ve always been fascinated by the people and places around me. I love how diverse our planet is and I can’t wait to get my kids excited about geography. When I was deciding which direction to take this unit, I thought it would be best to go deeper into certain areas rather than trying to cover too much in such a short time. If you’re like me, you have a tendency to get overwhelmed at the possibilities and areas within a subject area… It’s completely normal.

Here’s what we’re doing for our geography unit:

Written Travel Guide

-          Write a Lonely Planet travel guide that is informative and entertaining including the following:

·         Country or region

·         Geography

·         Climate

·         Language

·         Population

·         Culture

·         Tradition

·         Currency

·         Festivals

·         Important information

 

Create a Video, Skit, or Puppet Show

·         Script is written, rehearsed, and presented to class

·         Costumes, props, or visual aids are made

·         Content must showcase something unique to a specific culture

 

Teach an art lesson to the class

·         Choose a famous artist, art piece, or time period

·         Research the culture or history

·         Re-create it

·         Plan and teach an art lesson about it to the class





Here's a copy of my Understanding By Design Lesson for this unit. Feel free to copy or adapt for your own class.