Student Self Direction

Student Self Direction - Part II

A few weeks ago I wrote about a teacher who uses student self direction learning in her class every Friday - http://sciencenotebooking.blogspot.com/2013/01/student-directed-learning-form.html. Another teacher saw the post and has developed a game plan for next year and wrote about it on her blog (http://jessicaywinston.blogspot.com/2013/05/self-directed-learning.html). I really like her ideas and will be following her posts closely as she implements this great teaching idea (picture of her schedule above is from her blog).

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Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21). I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class. We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online). One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom. All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...

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...

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

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