Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

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We had a short week (four days) to accommodate parent/teacher conferences. This also coincided with the start of our Fall break here. Students and teachers are off for a week. Our district has Extended Learning Time for students who have been identified as needing remediation and they will have school next week (small groups focusing on reading and math). Since I had a short week (that also combined an "end of quarter" party Thursday) I choose not to start any new material in the notebooks. We will be starting Astronomy when we get back. I designated this week "tech week" and had the great idea of teaching my fourth graders Photostory. Sadly if it could go wrong it did. Photostory had been removed from the computer lab computers and our laptop lab during summer re-imaging and I failed to check it assuming it would have still been on the computers from last year. Lesson learned! The original plan was for students to choose one of the following and create a Photostor

Monday Students worked with their clock partners to complete a "fill in the blank" study guide. We played a couple of review games and worked on vocabulary BINGO. Tuesday Reviewed for test and completed a simple dew point experiment - does the size of the container affect the dew point temperature? Wednesday End of unit test Thursday We caught up on our notebooks. I was grading and students needed to make sure they had finished everything on the pages I had listed on the board (including coloring). Friday Students watched a Blizzard video. Kind of fun since we don't get blizzards down here in the deep south.

We are ending our unit on weather this week. Next week will primarily be filling in the study guide and a few review games. Monday Checked our evaporation experiment. Reviewed water cycle from last week. Sang the song. Presented a PowerPoint I made about clouds (which includes careers that need to know about clouds - pilots, astronauts, professional fisherman, etc.). Read a notebook page about how clouds form (students drew pictures of each stage) and about the three basic type of clouds. Went outside to look at and identify cloud types (pretty disappointing...all stratus clouds but students enjoyed being outside). Tuesday Checked our evaporation experiment. Did the "cloud in the bottle" with the class. Showed a YouTube video of something similar. Introduced fronts. Used weather.com to show map, map symbols, and talked about air masses affecting the US. Acted out air masses meeting. Made inferences about our upcoming weather and checked out the 10 day forecast. Read our noteb

I often create my own crossword puzzles and word searches for my science class. These can be assigned for homework but more often I use them as extra work students can do when they are done a test or quiz. If you type in "make your own word search" lots of different websites come up. I usually use the Discover Education site to make mine. Three years ago I made test shields out of two taped together file folders (they have held up pretty well). Inside the folder I put the test/quiz and a puzzle. This keeps earlier finishers quiet and engaged while others finish up.