Skip to main content

Fortune Teller Project
















This week I have my students working on fortune tellers for each of our units that we have completed (weather, astronomy, light/magnets/electricity, organisms and their environment).

I am not sure all the other teachers are happy now that all the fourth grade know how to make them :)

I taped a quart size baggie in each of the notebooks to put them all in.

This was an "end of year" project but could easily be done at the end of each unit. I used the largest paper I could get from the art room (stay away from construction paper weight...it becomes too bulky for the notebooks...the closer you can stay to regular weight paper the better).
Students had to come up with eight questions and answers related to the unit (using their notebook to come up with questions). They had to illustrate and color. Aside from the initial instruction this was a largely independent project (I played some Kidz Bop CD's in class while they worked) done over five days (one day for each fortune teller and a makeup day if needed). I thought if I did this at the end of a unit that I might have students pair up for a minute to answer each others questions and then have them switch partners so that they get a chance to move around and review.
This project was run concurrent with the ABC and Decoupage project.

Comments

Ginger Snaps said…
That is a really cute idea.
Lisa Mandina said…
New follower. I teach 7th graders. Just curious as to how they decide what to put on the 4 outside flaps? I'm thinking to do this with my Electricity unit I'm finishing, and maybe next week before winter break as a fun review activity. ANy help would be awesome! Over my winter break I'm going to be looking through your note booking stuff, as I've been trying to do an interactive notebook this past year! Great blog!
Eve Heaton said…
Thank you Lisa for following my blog! I had students put vocabulary terms on the outside of the flaps. So when a child picks that particular flap the person operating the fortune teller would have to spell it when they went through the motions of opening and closing the fortune teller (does that make sense?).
Unknown said…
This is such a great idea! I had my fifth & fourth grade students create one today for science :) Thanks for the inspiration.

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.

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