Skip to main content

Our Week








Monday - Students received study guides and teamed up with clock partners to fill in. Reviewed the answers. Watched Bill Nye Electric Currents.
Tuesday - Spent half the day in the computer lab playing a great British electrical circuits game called Silicon Spies. The game takes about 30 minutes to play (counting logging in). Spent the other half of the day testing out our electric circuit boxes (see pictures above). I borrowed these boxes from one of our teachers in the school who was an ex-science lab teacher from another school. They look pretty easy to make and that make my summer "to do" list.

Wednesday - Brought in light bulbs (old clear type with filament and the new CFL's). Passed around for students to see. We watched a short video on YouTube about CFL's (very good) and then watched a show I downloaded from Discovery Streamline - Animated Classics Thomas Edison Invents the Light Bulb. Played vocabulary Bingo.

Thursday - End of unit exam. I gave the students some activity sheets I found online that they worked on quietly after the exam to give me time to grade. Grading is my least favorite activity and I tend to procrastinate. This gave me a chance to get quite a few graded, and as an added bonus I was able to show students their scores immediately.

Friday - Valentines Day exchange....so we were a little less focused. I was going to have students start their title page for their next unit but went with a video about Coral Reefs as an introduction to several things were are going to learn about in our new unit (Organisms and their Environments). The movie is very good, about 45 minutes long and focuses on life in a coral reef and why reefs are dying. I created a link to Amazon about the video but you might want to try out Netfix if you don't want to purchase it and you have a subscription or half.com if you want to purchase it (often times cheaper then amazon...just factor in the shipping and handling). I am not sure how much the students got out of it...since most of them were going to town with their Valentine's Day candy :)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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.
13 comments
Read more

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...
5 comments
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more