Science - Video Project

In my new position as a technology coach one of the things I try to do is provide sample projects that teachers can do in their classroom with their students.

Since my interest is science I tend to pick projects for that field. The video above is one that I worked on with a group of fourth grade students. It is based on a video style used by Common Craft in their In Plain English Videos. They are very good very simple videos put together using paper creations.

Other teachers in other districts have done this and one even put an instructional video on YouTube to help students understand the process.

To prepare the student I had working with me on this project (which we did end of year after state testing) I made them watch one Common Craft video and the instructional video. I then showed them the three videos below that someone made (about the difference between banks and credit unions) based on the same style to give them a sense of the playfulness and "acting" they should do (those videos really got them jazzed to make it engaging).

Video One

Video Two

Video Three

I gave them a quiet place, a video camera (flip), tripod, paper, pencils, and a black sharpie marker and crayons. Their instruction was to come up with a video that could be used as a public service announcement that would be used to teach people about some topic of concern. This group choose keeping South Carolina water clean. The two girls I had working on this were very bright and came up with pretty good reasons. I was involved in a very limited way. I did jump in when we had to edit their clips together in Movie Maker (we used Movie Maker Live which is the new version of Movie Maker and a lot more user friendly for students). Once the kids got the general gist they were able to pretty much do it on their own. I was actually really impressed and they were super proud of the results!

This would make a great end of year project for students (probably in grades 4 and up) and can be used outside of science. I was thinking any historical event or even a creative book review.

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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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