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.

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!

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.

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!

Children's Book Project

We are wrapping up our earth science unit and getting ready to go on spring break here in a week, so I really wanted to give my students a language arts project to tie it all together before they go on vacation and forget it allJ It’s been quite a few weeks since we’ve done any sort of narrative writing because we’ve been in our expository unit, so I wanted to give them the option to do some creative writing for a change.

For this assignment, the students have two options- 1) Create a storybook that relates in some way to earth science, or 2) make a picture dictionary that relates to earth science. In either case, students will be responsible for creating a 20-page book for a young child audience. This is great because it forces them to think about their word choice and eliminates the “copy & paste” method that they may be tempted to use. Plus, it gives both right-brained and left-brained students the opportunity create something cool.

On my search for a digital option for this project, I remembered storybird.com. I’d used it last year, but completely forgot what a great site it was for creating stories. Since that really only works for the storybook option, I also gave my students the choice to create a wikispaces page. Here’s the rubric and guidelines that I created for this project along with a really great storybird story. If you haven’t used this site, I suggest you check it out. It’s awesome, and better yet, it’s free!
Happy Saturday, folks!

Children's Book Project Guidelines
Children's Book Project Rubric
 

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

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

 

 

 

 

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.



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!
 

 

Online Book Reviews

Well, we made it through our final assessments, survived our last service learning fundraiser, and wowed parents at our Christmas concert… now it’s time for a break. Trust me, there were several times over the last couple of weeks where I didn’t think we’d get here, but I’m so happy to be on the other side of it.

Back when I was mentally preparing for how to keep my students busy over the break, I put together a reading competition through Google Drive and linked it to our class edmodo page to keep track of their progress and keep them motivated to read. I got a couple of prizes for the winner(s) and got the students pumped up before school let out. Winners will be announced when we return from break… Stay tuned.

If you’ve never used Google Drive, you should try it out. Google Drive is such a great tool for digitizing your classroom, AND it free! From creating surveys, sharing presentations and documents, to keeping your students accountable for their assignments, this allows you to do it all- and with ease. Here’s the online book review form that I made for my class.  

Here’s what I did:

1.      Log in to your Google account and select the Drive tab at the top of the menu bar.  

 

2.      Go to Create and you will see a drop-down menu with a few selections.

 

3.      Click on Form and this will take you to a form where you can add questions to fit your form.

 

4.      Upload the link to your form as an assignment on your edmodo page and it will automatically tally the forms for you as the students fill them in.

 

 

And there you have it, folks. Have a great vacation!

Service Learning Slideshow

The semester is just about over, but there’s still a TON of work to be done. I have no idea how this seems to happen every year, but it does. No matter how prepared I try to be or how much I plan, Christmas seems to hit me like a Mack Truck. It doesn’t help that I’ve picked up one of the kids’ bugs and have been sick all week. BUT… we’re almost there, that’s the good news.

To finish the semester strong, we decided to create a slideshow to showcase all of the work that we’ve done this semester for service learning. It was a great way to look back on all of our hard work, and feel good about how much we’ve helped the community. AND, we got to learn how to use some new technology in the computer lab. We used imovie to create this one, but you could also use MS Movie Maker to make something similar.

The teachers haven’t decided if we’d like to continue with the service learning program in the spring, but I have a feeling the kids won’t give us a choice. They really enjoyed it and learned a lot ( I think) from it. Here’s our finished slideshow:

 

Happy Christmas, everyone!
 

Biome Research Project

One of my science standards this unit was to address biomes and habitats. Because I'm trying to move my classroom into the 21st century, I wanted to get away from teaching straight out of the book and go digital. I absolutely love having this kind of creative freedom as a teacher.

Anyway, I made these nifty NatGeo research journals (attached below) for my students to study different biomes around the world during our ecology unit. I wanted to cater to the different types of learners in class and this was the perfect tool. I sent them on a little digital adventure as modern-day researchers to collect data and present their findings to their team at headquarters. I wanted them to look for key characteristics such as plant and animal life, climate, and human impacts while documenting their findings. It’s great because these research journals are going to make the perfect study guides for the test coming up in 2 weeks.

 

After completing their research journals, they each chose their favorite terrestrial or aquatic biome and created a digital presentation that they delivered to the class the following week. My students hit this one out of the park. Here are a few examples of their work:

 

 

Desert biome Prezi

 

marine biome presentation

rainforest biome presentation

Savannas biome presentation

Research Journal Pages:
-Cover
-Aquatic Biome
-Terrestrial Biome    

21st Century book reports

Now that week one is out of the way, we’re heading full-force into the school year and I’m pretty excited about what’s in store. As you may recall from my post on thematic teaching, we’ve started the year off with a simple, yet great book about Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who died from Leukemia years after the bombing in Hiroshima. I wanted to review concepts like plot, setting, conflict/resolution and theme, but find written book reports to be, um, BORING. So Mr. J showed us this funky, free site where the kids can create their own videos, choose graphics and play around with animation all while presenting the information that they’ve written. The website is www.goanimate.com and the possibilities to incorporate it into teaching are infinite. Check out a couple of examples that came from my students this week:

 

Sadako and the thousand paper cranes by winnie4 on GoAnimate

Animation Software - Powered by GoAnimate.


 

sadako report by arthur2 on GoAnimate

Animation Software - Powered by GoAnimate.


Happy hump day everyone!!!

Integrating Technology

Like it or not, we are living in a digital world. For someone who is not technologically inclined, the transition to a digital world can be intimidating or just downright scary. That’s exactly where I’m at with the current administrative push to have everything online. Trust me, I see the benefits of integrating technology and I’m excited to simplify my life, but I am definitely a creature of habit. I like writing things in a planner, making lists, and the creativity that comes from doing things by hand. But there’s no denying that this is the direction in which education is heading and I don’t want to miss the boat so…

I got back from vacation late Tuesday night and work started bright and early on Wednesday morning. Somehow I survived and am (mostly) ready for my kids to start in 2 day. We’ve been doing some training and professional development because they’re “streamlining everything”. Lucky for us we’ve got an amazing new grade 5 teacher with an IT background. He’s exactly what the school needs in terms of training and integrating technology. Anyway so we’re now all using Google Drive, an online calendar with embedded lesson plans, an online grade book that the parents can log into (what?!) and so much more. Here’s a presentation he put together to help set up our Engrade accounts and start using all the awesome features it offers. Check out how it works here.

Aside from the Google Apps stuff, we’re also using Edmodo. If you’ve never heard of it, you HAVE TO check it out. It’s touted as the “Facebook for Teachers” in that it allows you to post a library of online tools, websites, resources, etc. that are organized and available to your students 24 hours a day. Plus, you can create small groups of student within your class to do anonymous differentiated learning. This is AMAZING stuff, folks. If you haven’t checked it out yet, do yourself a favor and sign up here.

 

Alright kids, one more training/planning day then the kids come. All 4 of them. Sigh. Have a good night and thanks for reading.