Recommended Books

I know I have mentioned the author Dinah Zike before but here are three of my favorite books by her. I use ideas from these books constantly in the classroom. They are well worth the money I spent on them. I currently have my fingers crossed that I get a NEA grant I applied for to attend her "foldables" workshop in Texas this summer (too expensive on my own and remains listed under my dream professional development list).

Currently I am on spring break and I grabbed these three off my school bookshelf to take home and see what will jump out at me as I plan for the end of the year. I have spoken to pre-service teachers at our local university and I always bring them with me and recommend them as "must haves" on any teachers bookshelf (she also has other books but obviously I am focused on science...I know after bringing them to school the fourth grade social studies teachers purchased her social studies book).

Comments

Mendy Gannon said…

Is the classroom organization book better for newbies or could everyone benefit? I've seen it online, but can't really get a feel for it. (Wish they would put up a table of contents)

Have you heard about your NEA grant for the foldables workshop?

May 3, 2009 at 12:38 PM

Eve Heaton said…

I think it could benefit anyone. There are a lot of ideas that use recycled material - which I like - and are pretty inexpensive. I haven't run across ideas like she has in other organization books. She just added a classroom organization class to her academy in Texas. You are more then welcome to borrow mine to see if it was worth getting. I borrowed the one I have from another teacher and put so many flags on it that I wound up buying her a new books so I wouldn't have to remove the tags. It is a bit dated (picture wise) but the material is still relevant.

I heard back last week and it is a big no this go around. I saved my application and plan to submit again...my plan is to just plain wear them out resubmitting (you can submit that one twice a year).

May 3, 2009 at 6:10 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

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