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

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!

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.



Constitutions

 

For our theme unit on citizenship and government, the students were tasked with creating a country and then later writing a national constitution to outline their chosen type of government, laws, and rights and responsibilities of their citizens. I think I was being a bit unrealistic about what a big project this would be for my students, but they did really well overall. We studied different forms of government and looked up constitutions from around the world to get familiar with the structure and organization before we drafted ours. After several revisions and lots of peer-editing (and what feels like a thousand years), we were ready for publishing. YAY! This part was, by far, the most fun we had with this project. We took sheets of white cardstock and dyed them with tea, burned the edges to make them look old and authentic, and then practiced our best penmanship to create our finished product.

If I had this to do over, I would have scrapped it all together because of the level of difficulty. Concepts like political ideology are a bit too advanced for my students. I feel like they learned a lot about the role of government in a country, but aside from that, this was a disaster. So, if you’re thinking about doing something similar, I recommend that you simplify as much as possible. Here’s a photo of one of the final products. If you want a sample constitution, send me a message and I’ll email it to you. Enjoy your weekend!

Thematic Teaching

Our school is using a thematic approach to cross-curriculum teaching. The idea behind a thematic approach is to weave a strong central theme into as many subjects as possible so as to foster a deeper learning and meaning for the student. Here’s an overview of how we’re applying the thematic approach to teach a variety of subjects all linked together through this central theme unit of Citizenship & Government. Our first unit is 5 weeks, but most are 4.

Citizenship & Government in Language Arts

·         Reading- we’re starting the year with non-fiction texts so I chose the story of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I wasn’t sure what levels my readers would be so I decided that a book with easy language and strong content would be good for our first assignment. If you’ve never read this story, you should. It’s a simply written story about a young girl who falls ill with Leukemia several years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Sounds like the perfect opportunity to think about the concepts of citizenship and government in the context of this book. Plus, we get to do some cool reader’s workshops and I can roll out the reader’s notebook and show them how we use it.

·         Writing- since we’ve started reading non-fiction, we’re going to take on biographies first in our writer’s workshops over the next two weeks. As you know, I signed my class and I up at edmodo.com to help streamline assignments & homework, increase student involvement, and make my life easier all while saving the environment. So within edmodo.com, I’ve signed my class up to start blogging with students in America to try to open up a dialogue about culture and global citizenship. I’m unbelievably excited about the possibilities that this can bring for the school year. Think penpals, but with all the modern conveniences of audio, video, and instantaneous communication. Anyway, the first finished writing piece will be an autobiography that will be shared with the overseas students. I’ll let you know how this all unfolds as the weeks pass.

·         Spelling/Vocab- Thankfully, this unit has an abundance of spelling and vocabulary words for upper primary students. We’re using www.quizlet.com this year for all of our spelling and vocab. If you haven’t seen this website, you ought to. It’s super simple to use (both for students and teachers) and it pretty much does everything for you. All you have to do is type in your weekly spelling list, choose (or type your own) definitions, and have your students login to study and play games. It even generates randomized tests with the kind of test questions you want! How cool is that?

·         Social Studies- Grades 5 & 6 are teaming up on a few projects this year for social studies and science so, for this theme, we’re having the students create their own country and draft a short constitution to be presented at the end of the unit. Since these are difficult concepts for kids, we began the lesson with a fun activity to demonstrate the value of having “laws” and had them create an online KWL chart to assess what they knew about citizenship and government. Some really great discussion questions came out of their KWL charts and now it gives me an idea of what I need to cover in my social studies lessons. Also, it helps me know what they are curious and want to know more about. Here are a few questions that came from my students this week:

  

    Pretty great, huh? Looks like I need to step up my game to get them the answers they’re looking forJ

·         Math- We’ll be looking at things like statistics, polling, budgets, and spending, but the possibilities to tie in math are virtually endless. My students will be conducting a school-wide survey about “public opinion” stuff and tallying their findings. Then, after they’ve collected their hard data, they’ll have to figure out how to best present their findings. I’m curious to see what they come up with.

·         Art- At least for week one, I’d like to tie in Japanese culture because it goes so well with our book and I love, love, love Japanese art. We’ll be watching a clip from the documentary Between the Folds and looking at the paper craft of origami. Because our book is about paper cranes and because they are the only origami thing I know how to make, that’s where we’ll start. There are a couple of origami books in the library and, if we get stuck, there’s always youtube.

Well folks, there you have it. That’s the best reader’s digest version I can give you about our school’s approach to thematic teaching. I hope it helped. Have a great week!