A {Last} Peek at My Week {9-28-14}

Happy Sunday everyone!  Welcome to another Peek at My Week.  I hope you will share your plans for the upcoming week.

The beginning of the year has been crazy and I am just now been feeling like I am starting to catch up.  Do you know that feeling?  This is what my life has felt like lately...

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But I guess that's what weekends were made for...

So you may have noticed that I labeled this post my {last} Peek at My Week.  Yes, it is true, this will be the final edition of this linky party.  There are lots of other great things I'd like to do with this blog and I just feel it's time for a change.  I thank all of you who have linked up in the past.  I have learned so much from you.  On the bright side, Positive Thinking Thursday will continue!  I hope to see your link ups there!

Now on with my plans for this week...

I'm excited to announce that our Chromebooks have arrived and we are now a 1:1 classroom!  They were delivered on Friday and the kids couldn't wait to use them.  They are even touchscreen!

This is perfect timing because I am beginning my guided reading groups this week.  One of the activities the students will be required to do is to visit the Wonderopolis website.

Because our tech has been limited up until the arrival of the Chromebooks, we have only been able to explore this website one time a week which we called Wonder Wednesdays.

In Science, we are also beginning a new unit on the Human Body Systems.  This is one of my favorite units to teach and the kids love it too.  One of their favorite activities is showing how the stomach turns food into a soupy mix by putting a saltine cracker into a sandwich baggie with a couple teaspoons of water and then massaging the bag until the cracker is mush.  It looks pretty gross but it gets the point across.

An InLinkz Link-up

Have a great week!

Positive Thinking Thursday & Bringing Science into ELA

Is it Friday yet?  This week, which is our first week back from break, is flying by.  I almost forgot what day it was....Yes, it is Wednesday.  But it is not too early to share with you my positive thought for tomorrow's linky, Positive Thinking Thursday, in case you would like to share my thought with your staff or link up to share your own! (If you would like to read about how I use Positive Thinking Thursday with my fellow teachers and staff, you can read about it here.)

This week's positive thought is in honor of all of us who are trying many different things to keep our students (and ourselves!) engaged until the end of the year:

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I think I made it all the way to "Plan E" today!  :)

If you have a positive thought (or picture, story, or video) to share with the rest of us, I hope you will link up at the end of this post.  It can be anything inspiring, funny, positive or motivating that you found through sources such as Pinterest or your own life.  (Please don't forget to credit your source!)

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I don't know about you, but finding time to fit everything into the day is quite the challenge!  I would love to have science and social studies class every day, but unfortunately, that doesn't happen.  (We currently have one or the other for about 25 minutes a day.) So, given that I don't have a lot of dedicated time to these content areas, how do I incorporate these topics into our day?  By bringing them into our ELA block!

As you know, April is Poetry Month.  A few weeks ago, Susan at Adventures in Fourth Grade shared with me a resource that she uses to teach poetry, The Poetry Friday Anthology.

This is a great resource to use for teaching poetry throughout the year and there are poems that range from being silly to being serious.  I love the variety!

This week, I chose a poem called Centipede by Micheal Rosen that talked about the important job that centipedes do in breaking down materials to create compost.  From this poem, students learned that centipedes live in "sodden" (soggy) places (love the new vocabulary!) and that what they eat helps produce compost for growing other plants.  

After reading this poem every day, we did a short activity -- We discussed new vocabulary (sodden, hoarded, milkweed pod), talked about figurative language used in the poem, discussed how the colon (:) is used to set off a list and more!  The best part is that this only takes 10 minutes a day!  

We also looked up facts about the centipede on the internet and learned some amazing things about them!  

Did you know...

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• Centipedes don't have 100 legs?
• They become dehydrated easily which is why they don't live in deserts very often and like to stay under damp rocks and earth?
• Their front legs are actually poisonous fangs?
• They can grow new legs to replace those that are lost when attacked by a predator?

I'm sure you are fascinated...Well, my students were and all of this came from a simple poem!

 I'm excited to link up with Ideas by Jivey today for her Workshop Wednesday linky to share how I incorporate Science into my Reading block.

I hope you will head over to her blog and check out other great ideas for Science integration!  Jivey has a great post today in which she shares lots of mentor texts to use for Science.  (I'm sure my friends at Amazon will be hearing from me soon!)

An InLinkz Link-up

Spark Saturday -- Energy Coasters

I hope everyone had a wonderful week!  I know that I sure did.  This week really FLEW for me.  We have 8 days left when we go back on Tuesday.  I can't believe it!

I'm linking up with Joanne at Head Over Heels For Teaching for her Spark Student Motivation Saturdays.  What better topic is there to match up with "spark" Saturday than ENERGY???

As you know, this is the time of year (for those of us who haven't begun summer break yet) that us teachers have to pull out all the stops to keep our students motivated.  Earlier this week, I posted about a project we did in science in which we learned about potential and kinetic energy by building spool racers.  (You can read that post here if you missed it!)  This was a highly engaging and motivating learning activity for my kiddos and to keep the "energy" flowing (pun intended ;), I followed the spool racer activity up with Energy Rollercoasters.

Here's the deal....

Using about 6 feet of plastic tubing, masking tape and BB's, my kiddos had to construct a section of a rollercoaster on the wall to demonstrate how potential and kinetic energy and gravity move the BB through the section of track.  Their coaster had to have:

• One "up" hill
• One "down" hill
• At least one loop

If their BB got stuck, they did not have enough potential energy built up to have kinetic energy take the BB to the end so they had to untape their layout and try again.

This picture demonstrates the ultimate goal....your BB having enough energy to make it to your cup.

When they were finished, the students sketched out their layout, identified the point of greatest potential energy and the greatest kinetic energy,  and filled out a reflection (which does not seem to want to load here...ugh!  My computer must be ready for summer break!).

I had planned on giving the students about 20 minutes to complete their rollercoaster layouts, but because they were having so much fun with it and kept asking if they could try another design or add more loops, etc., I just let them go with it for about 45 minutes.

I just love hands-on learning and try to load these last two weeks up with lots of activity to keep students motivated and learning.  I am excited to read what others bloggers do to keep a spark in their classrooms this time of year.  Why don't you head on over to Head Over Heels and check some out for yourself???

Have a great long weekend!

Learning About Energy -- Spool Racing!

I know many of you are already on summer break or are winding down with your last week, but here in southeastern Wisconsin we still have three weeks of school left.   We are out on June 6th and staff goes back at the end of August.  The kids don't report until after September 1st because in Wisconsin it is a law that school can't start until after September first....Isn't that interesting?  Personally, I would prefer an earlier start and an earlier finish, but I really can't complain!

One of my favorite units to teach in science is the unit on energy and I always save this unit until the end of the year when we need something FUN to ENGAGE us.  (You know what I'm talking about, right?)  We have been studying potential and kinetic energy and I found this very cool lesson from Zoom on PBS (you remember that show from when you were a kid, don't you???).  You can find the directions here and a video from YouTube to show your students how to build the spool racers here.  (This may also lead to an interesting discussion about what video looked like before HD media!)

Using wooden spools, toothpicks, a rubber band, tape, and a pencil, students worked in pairs to build their spool racer to use for racing.  (Also a great lesson for following directions!)

 

 

After building the spool racers, it was RACE TIME! 

 

After the racing was over, we had a great discussion about:

• Where in the spool was the potential energy being built up?
• How was the kinetic energy shown?
• What modifications could be made to the spool racer to increase the potential energy and thus, the kinetic energy?
• Why did some cars spin in circles?
• What other modifications could be made to the spool racer to increase the energy?
• What role did factors like carpeting (and friction) play in the race?
• Did forces like pushing help?

When the race and discussions were over, we packed up our supplies in these baggies and they are ready to go for next year!

Needless to say, the students were OVERLY engaged with this activity and it was a fun way to test out energy.  I have one more potential and kinetic energy activity that we will be doing this week (building rollercoasters) so check back soon for that.  So much FUN and so EASY!

Wishing you an amazing week!



It's a Very Buggy World

There is nothing my 4th graders love more than getting up close with science!  They were overjoyed when I told them that we would be studying the life cycle of a mealworm in our Life Cycle unit.  (Me...not so much!)

After obtaining my science specimens from the local Petsmart store, the kids made sure they became a part of our classroom -- our class pets, if you will.  We set up a cage for them, complete with oatmeal and Cheerios, and watched them feed on carrots and lettuce leaves.  (Some of the bugs were even so talented that they used the Cheerios as a sort-of hula hoop -- very entertaining!)  I had the students write about the worms in their "Diary of an Earthworm" journals.  (I try to incorporate as much writing in my core areas as possible.)

Now anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of anything that slithers, crawls, or otherwise acts even remotely like a worm or snake.  Imagine how excited I was (not!) when our little earthworms decided to demonstrate the pupa stage of the mealworm life cycle and turn into little white puffs of blobbiness.

 

I was even able to get a close up of one of them...

 

 

 

Isn't she a beauty???

 

Any day now the pupas will be changing into the next phase of their life cycle -- beetles.  At that point, we are going to have to set our class pets free....