Colored Pencil/Crayon Problem (Solution)

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 sharpeners but I think I will take care of that this weekend with a trip to Staples.

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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

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