12 Tech Days Before Christmas

12 Tech Days Before Christmas - Day 6

Day 6

The 12 Days of Christmas – Math Lesson

Students listen to the 12 Days of Christmas - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF1xcKW2e-g (you can use the YouTube Downloader so you don’t have to stream it live).

I am not going to lie...this is probably one of my least favorite Christmas songs (it goes on FOREVER) but I liked the math lesson. I've been booked to do this with a third grade class next week but instead of doing the tech integration below (with an Excel spreadsheet) we are going to be using calculators. The teacher and I think that introducing Excel to 3rd graders with this project would be a little difficult.

Printable lyrics can be found on the following site - http://www.chiff.com/home_life/holiday/christmas/12-days-lyrics.htm

Students figure out how many items are in the song using the lyrics sheet. Then they calculate the cost of all the items in the song. Lesson plan with forms can be found on the following site – http://www.nsa.gov/academia/_files/collected_learning/elementary/arithmetic/twelve_days_christmas.pdf

I found the only forms I would need from the site are:

- - Order Form

- - Cost Form

- - Money Form

(Tech Integration) Instead of calculating the cost of the twelve items manually children can be taught to set up an Excel spreadsheet with formulas.

Comments

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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