Journal within a Journal Idea

This was something I came up with during our weather unit. I wanted students to track the weather for about 10 days and I developed this weather journal (using the Publisher catalog template).

The first two pages were general weather map and symbol information. The remaining pages all looked the same. At the start of each class I would put today's weather map and ten day forecast on the interactive whiteboard from http://www.weather.com/ and have a couple of students go outside to check the cloud cover and type, wind speed, and I started having them read and record the barometer.

I liked the journal within the journal idea and will use it again when we start our composting project. I wouldn't do it for more then 10 days. I still have students rotate the weather job in the morning and they post the weather in the hall (I blew up the journal page above to poster size and laminated it..students plug in the information). I think next year I will have the last pages in the journal involving graphing so that students can graph the high and low temperatures, how many sunny vs. cloudy days, the barometer reading (which was really hard to read for all of us...next year I think I might invest in a digital barometer).

I also like the idea of a moon journal, where students color in the phase of the moon for a month. I didn't think of that while we were studying the moon this year but I will definitely make one next year.

Comments

Mrs. Crouse said…

where did you get this weather journal template?

Mrs. Crouse @ {6th} Grade All-Stars

November 10, 2012 at 4:30 PM

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 ...

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Search This Blog