Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

This week in class we have been looking at the water cycle. Monday Introduced the water cycle with a Promethan Planet flip chart. Taught the steps of the water cycle song (click here to see a TeacherTube video of some of my students from last year singing it with hand motions). Watched a BrainPop on the water cycle. Read a left hand notebooking assignment about the water cycle. Students started working on the right hand assignment which was a flip picture of the water cycle where students had to write which step of the water cycle each flip was and what it does. For a couple of classes I made cut and paste cards that students had to match and glue under the flaps (faster and helped with students who write large). Tuesday Reviewed water cycle and water cycle song. Showed short Streamline Video recapping the water cycle (approx. 15 min). Gave students a "fill in the blank" brochure I had made to go with the textbook chapter about the water cycle (the inside flap was vocab...

This week was one of those odd weeks where I happened to be out for three days. Despite some typical "sub behavior" things seemed to go pretty well as far as using the notebooks. Monday Lesson plan focus was introducing students to different type of severe weather and related safety tips. Students read and discussed a left hand sheet that I had glued into their books before I left. They were encouraged to discuss their own encounters with severe weather. My sub, whom I spoke to before I left, brought in newspaper articles of Hurricane Hugo and was able to contribute to the discussion. For the right hand assignment students had to pull a safety tip out of a bag (I had put together 27 or so that I found on the internet covering lightning, hurricanes, and tornadoes) they had to share the tip they pulled, discuss why it was a good safety tip, and then a draw a poster that went with the tip on the right hand side of their book. Tuesday Lesson focus was comparing and contrasting h...

I allow both colored pencils and crayons in the notebook and students started becoming sloppy using the crayons. I decided I wanted colored pencils ONLY. So I purchased five plastic shoe boxes from the local dollar store (one for each table grouping) and loaded them up with the colored pencils I had purchased this past summer when they went on sale for .25 a pack. Luckily I had asked for donations of colored pencils at the end of last year and got a TON (thank you Ms. Musgrave for that suggestion) and divided those up among the five boxes. I then added hand held sharpeners to each box (the ones that catch the shavings). Those were on sale at Staples this past summer for a penny each and I should have bought more. Ideally I would have three sharpeners per box but at the moment it is one (maybe two). Because there are so many colored pencils in the box I have not experienced any whining ("So and so has the only black pencil!") there has been some fighting for the pencil sharpe...

Monday We kicked off our weather unit with a lesson on the layers of the atmosphere. Not technically a fourth grade standard in weather I still introduced it because the atmosphere comes up in our Astronomy unit. On the left hand side was a cloze note sheet that went along with a PowerPoint I made about the different layers. Students had to fill in as I went through the presentation. Students then watched a BrainPop on the subject. On the right hand side I had made a flip book for students to make and illustrate about the layers. Tuesday We discussed weather tools and their uses. On the left hand side there was a fact sheet about the basic tools that we read. I had a flipchart to go with it with plenty of pictures. I had samples in the class to pass around. On the right hand side students filled out an accordion foldable where they had to list the tool, give its use, and draw a picture (to make the accordion foldable click on the "video" label on the right hand side men...

This was a short week because we had Monday off for Labor Day and I had a substitute because I was selected for jury duty on Tuesday (and we all know how we just love making sub plans...ha!...luckily it was only for the one day). This is what we did for the week. Monday (with substitute) - They started a mini science fair board in their notebook for an experiment that we did involving soda and different types of coozies (this is an example of how I abandon the right hand/left hand rule....I glued mini science fair boards on both the right and left hand side because we had done two experiments). Tuesday - Group review of everything we had learned to date (lab safety, observations / inferences / predictions, qualitative and quantitative observations, scientific method, and variables). I explained that while we had filled out lab data sheets for our experiments we still needed to present our information in a more user friendly format (hence the mini science fair boards - I was trying to ...

Last week we have been focusing on the steps of the scientific method and identifying variables in an experiment . Notebook Activities DAY 1 Left Hand Side - Steps of the scientific method in order with explanation of each step. Whole group instruction. Right Hand Side Activity - Students created a poster of the scientific method with steps, pictures, and color. Day 2 Left and Right Side - Lab paperwork (see picture above). We were testing out the effectiveness of different coozies . Students took the temperature of their soda in the coozie every 5 minutes for 20 min. Students watched a taped episode of Food Detectives - How To Cool Your Mouth After Eating Spicy Foods (scientists mention the scientific method during the part where they test the 5 second rule for food dropped on the floor) in between the timing of the soda. Reviewed the steps of the scientific method before and during the experiment and during the TV Show. Day 3 Reviewed scientific method (we had it down as a chant b...