Skip to main content

Foldables
















As noted in a previous post, I love incorporating foldables in the classroom. They are great for helping students retain and categorize information. I also find that when students have to create anything related to a topic they are more likely to remember the information.

For example, we were talking about the four different types of fungi. We read the textbook entry about fungi and watched a powerpoint with pictures and the affect of fungi on plants. Then we made a foldable that had four flaps (reinforcing that their are four types of fungi they were to remember). I had them draw pictures of the fungi underneath the flaps to help them visually recall the affects of fungi on plants.

Many foldables fit nicely into a notebook. I do have to trim some down...so always try them first.

Above are pictures of some the foldables I have used in the past with my notebooks (they represent a mixture of both middle and elementary school work but each could easily be adapted up or down as the need required).
Picture #1 - The fungi foldable mentioned above
Picture #2 - The plant life cycle (students drew pictures and wrote information about the stages underneath the flap)
Picture #3 - Leaves, Stems and Roots foldable. Students wrote information about each under the flaps.
Picture #4 - Warm and Cold Blooded Animals. Students had two draw pictures underneath the flap of how each of the animals they drew respond when in warm or cold weather.
Picture #5 - Layers of the Atmosphere Layered Flip Book. Underneath the flaps students had to describe each layer of the atmosphere and draw pictures of things they might find in that layer.

Comments

Unknown said…
I love your foldable about plant development. I plan to have my students make one for tomorrow!

Popular posts from this blog

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more