Menus - Trying it End of Year

I really really really like this idea and think it will work well with the notebooks. This book was recommended by a friend of mine (she has the social studies menu book) and I promptly bought the science book. The premise is that students are given a menu option of things to do to demonstrate (at different levels) their understanding of what they learned in a unit. Each activity is given a different point value and students have to accrue a certain amount of points by picking and choosing off a menu, bingo board (pictured above), etc.

The book is fairly new to me so I am looking through it and plan to try one of the "menus" (modified to fit our standards) at the end of the year (we have state testing coming up three weeks after we return from spring break so it will be after that). This way I can iron out the kinks and see how it would work within a unit.

I thought some other teachers might want to investigate the book before my "experiment", which I will definitely post the results of here on this blog. I would love to hear from teachers who have already incorporated menus in their classroom.

Comments

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21). I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class. We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online). One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom. All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...

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...

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Search This Blog