Digital Posters- Earth Science

 Sorry I’ve been MIA for a few days… I’ve been in the throes of planning and coordinating all kinds of stuff like Dr. Seuss week, our 100 days celebration, school Olympics, oh, and this little thing I do on the side called TEACHING. I’m starting to feel like I didn’t just have a week off!

Anyway, back to the real postJ We’re about a week and a half into our earth science unit and my kids have their first assignment due after the weekend; a digital poster collage about Earth’s layers and plate tectonics. Exciting stuff, folks!

I found the link for an online poster creator while I was browsing the community shares on edmodo and thought to myself, “Self, that’s a great idea. You should use that in your class.” So that’s exactly what I did for this assignment.

The website’s called glogster and basically, it’s just a graphics blog that allows students to design their very own posters using fun graphics, pictures, videos, and so much more. What makes this website even cooler? They have a separate page just for education so you don’t have to worry about them seeing anything they aren’t supposed to! Pretty neat, huh?

Check out the example poster I started along with my project guidelines below, and stay tuned for their finished posters, which I’ll add later. Happy almost Friday!

Digital Poster Project Guidelines

Squares and Square Roots- Math Journal

This week we’re starting our math unit on squares and square roots and believe it or not, not everyone is excited about it… This can be an extremely difficult concept for some students to grasp because there’s a tendency to want to just multiply the exponent. I remember some of my students struggling with these last year so I thought I’d nip it in the bud with a fun math journal activity.

After a brief overview of what squares and square roots are and how to find them, I passed out this worksheet I made for them to create squares and see visually how they can be expressed. The idea is that all squares have equal sides, right? That means if you are using a grid, you can make different-sized squares pretty easily without needing a ruler, and learn your squares accidently in the process. This really seemed to help my kiddos grasp the concepts we talked about in class.

 

I have attached a copy of the worksheet here if you want to use it in your class as a task board or supplemental activity. Hope they enjoy it!   

Kira-Kira Novel Study

One of the course books I chose this year was Kira-Kira, a realistic fiction novel by Cynthia Kadohata, written from a young girl’s perspective. The narrator of the story is Katie, the middle child of an immigrant family in rural Georgia in the 1950’s. The writing is beautifully simple and the author does an amazing job of allowing the reader to see the world through young eyes. From the moment we cracked the cover to the final page, the whole class (myself included) were hooked.

From a literary standpoint, the novel offers a lot of opportunity for discussion and analysis. It touches on all kinds of issues from racism to loss and is a good entry point for having difficult (but necessary) conversations. I loved it and can’t wait to teach it again to future students.

Aside from reading specific chapters in class as a group, I assigned partner read-alouds and reading homework so I wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page with comprehension, vocab, etc., so I created some online reading questions as chapters were assigned. Google Drive has definitely revolutionized the interaction I have with students. If you’re not using some of these amazing features, you are missing out my friends! Click here to see my short tutorial on creating these snazzy forms and check out the links below if you’re teaching this book and need reading questions… Any other good tween novel recommendations are always appreciated. Cheers!  

 

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-12

Chapters 13-16

 

 

 

 

Taboo- Geography Edition

Looking for a fun way to review science or social studies concepts? Students seem bored or uninterested in lessons at the end of a unit? Fret not my fellow teacher friends, a solution is here. The answer- PLAY A GAME! I can’t stress enough how much more my students seem to retain when they are forced to know it in a friendly competition among classmates. Sweeten the deal with reward points, a free homework pass for the winning team, or their name on the superstar wall… it’s a winner for sure.

This week’s review came from a game we used to play when I was growing up and is still fun as heck to play- Taboo. If you’re not familiar with this game, here’s how it’s played:

During their turn, each player is forced to describe a word or phrase to their team without using certain words. For example, you have to get your team to guess the word “circle”, but you can’t say shape, round, sphere, or square. This is such a great exercise for second language learners because it forces them to really think about what words to use. Plus, it’s an incredibly funny sight to watch as your students struggle to find the words they needJ

If you have time at the end of a lesson, you should give this one a try- it’s a riot!

Here’s a copy of the cards I made for our geography review, but any word or phrase will work.  

Cha-Ching! 100 days

Love it or hate it, money makes the world go ‘round. Well, not exactly- that’s physics, but there’s no denying its importance in today’s modern world. Building numeracy skills using money is a great way to get your kids excited about math. Plus, it gives you a reason to clean out your car’s cup-holders and all that loose change that accumulates on top of your washer from cleaning out pockets before throwing a load in. Ok, maybe that’s just me…

With our school’s 100^th day quickly approaching, I’ve been scouring the internets and racking my brain trying to come up with fun learning activities for the big day. Although there are zillions of ideas out there, many of them are far too easy for my students. But this one was the perfect 100^th day math activity I’ve been searching for- “How many ways can you make a dollar?” This is a good one for our class because the math books we use are made in Hong Kong so all the word problems deal in HKD, while our national currency in Vietnam is the VND with mostly notes and really high values. They don’t often get the chance to work with US coins and bills, so they were doubly interested.

 

For this activity, I brought in a bunch of loose change that I had in my stash from the states and made this corresponding worksheet for them to log their answers. Here’s a copy of the worksheet if you want to do this in your class. Enjoy!

Travel Video Project

This week, we are wrapping up our geography theme and tying up all the loose ends for the semester before our break. Although I am BEYOND excited for a little reprieve, it still feels like there are a thousand things left to do. I suppose that’s all part of teaching though… constantly in a state of playing catch-up. Anyway, before we go, I wanted to share our big theme project with you all and brag a little bit about what rockstars my kiddos are. It seems like whatever assignments I give them, they just take off and run with it. It’s truly amazing what they are capable of.

I created this slideshow on www.sliderocket.com to walk them through the project guidelines and inserted a short travel video to give them an example of what I was looking for. Basically, I wanted them to make a short, informative yet entertaining travel video showcasing what they thought were the best things to see and do in their chosen country. We used iMovie to create the videos, but this project could easily be done on Movie Maker and adapted for a larger class by dividing them into groups. They seemed to really enjoy putting their videos together and, hey, they even learned some human and physical geography in the process! Once we get them published and downloaded, I will post a couple of them here. Hope you’re having a great week.



Math Board Game Project

We are wrapping up our first semester here before the big Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday next week and I wanted to give my students a fun project that would help them review for the final exam. We love board games in my class, so any chance to integrate them into our learning, I’m all for. This is what I like to call “hiding vegetables in the lasagna” because it’s chock full of math, but it’s in the form of a fun board game- genius. Plus, who doesn’t love playing board games? J Anyway, this project was such a success last year that I thought I’d do it again. Here’s how we did it:

Each student group is responsible for creating a fun, challenging, and creative board game. This includes writing the game rules and objectives, creating question cards along with some form of an answer key, and making the actual game board. Class time and resources are available for them to complete this task, and when it’s finished, each group presents their game to the class. Once each group has presented their game, we take turns playing each of them during math or at task board time and then we take a little vote on which group had the best game. I give a little extra prize for the class favorite, but each group is graded according to the rubric for their own game. Here’s a copy of the project guidelines and rubric that I created if you want to try it out with your students… Enjoy!

 

What other math projects have you tried?