Skip to main content

Fun Observation Exercises







Here are three "observational" tests I give my students when I start talking about the importance of making good observations in science.

The first picture students have to find the arrow on the FedEx truck. I give them 2 minutes.

The second they have to find the hidden tiger.

The third they have to count how many "F's" are in the sentence. That is a fun one because they have a minute to count them and they all secretly write down their number and then I have them read them out loud and rarely does anyone get the same number.

The kids love being fooled. For the answers check the comments section.



Labels:

Comments

Eve Heaton said…
The arrow on the FedEx Truck is made up of the white space between the E and the X.

The hidden tiger can be find in the stripes of the tiger...the stripes spell out "The Hidden Tiger".

There are 6 "F's" in the sentence. Students tend to skip over the "f's" in the word "of".
August 3, 2010 at 7:59 AM
Ginger Snaps said…
That is pretty cool! Thanks for sharing!
August 3, 2010 at 10:14 AM
DomiQ said…
This is too cute! I'm definitely using this THIS week. I'm loving that I stumbled across this site!
September 12, 2010 at 6:47 PM
Unknown said…
I can only count 5 f's on the third picture.
September 30, 2010 at 7:45 PM
MateoZR said…
I can only count 5 Fs also.
September 28, 2015 at 7:08 PM
Unknown said…
i only see 5 fs on the third pic first i saw three but i didnt see the of
September 30, 2015 at 12:51 PM
I. Acevedo said…
Excellent activities!! And thanks for the answers. They are right!
December 10, 2015 at 1:46 AM
Unknown said…
Love it! Perfect for 2nd grade mini lesson on observation. Thank you for the share.
January 30, 2021 at 12:39 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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