Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I was lesson planning with the teacher in the second grade class I talked about in the last post (she was introducing habitats to her students). She was looking for some ideas so I taught her a song I learned from a training and we worked out a foldable her students could do. I liked that she had them write full sentences in the top flap of the foldable and they had to pick and justify one of the habitat requirements. I also did the same song with hand gestures in my fourth grade class in conjunction with their study of how environmental factors affect population growth. It doesn't matter what grade.... they all liked getting up to sing and move. Our standards tend to repeat every other year so what students are learning in 2nd grade get repeated more in depth in 4th and 6th grade.

I worked with a second grade teacher this past Friday during one of her TAP observations. She had set her lesson up in science stations and asked me to oversee and troubleshoot the computer station if needed. I really liked her stations because they incorporated reading, writing, technology and a hands-on activity. All stations were about 10 minutes in length. My favorite part of the lesson was her accountability sheet that the students took from station to station. You can find a copy of the sheet HERE . The lesson was on Arctic Habitats. Station 1 – Read and response. Students read a sheet that she got from Enchanted Learning about reindeer and they had to answer the questions that went with it. When they were done, or had to move stations, they stapled their reindeer sheet to the accountability sheet. Station 2 – Computer station. Students watched a six minute BrainPop Jr. video and took the quiz that went with it. They recorded their quiz score on the sheet that traveled ...

One of the classes I work with has just started their Organisims and their Environment unit. The first thing I usually do with this unit is place a plant next to me and tell children that we are both considered organisims. I have them work in table groups and try to come up with ways they think we are similar (we just became a TAP school so that opening would hit "questioning" and "grouping" on the rubric). I remember one year a good argument came up in class where one table group said that we are similar because we both move. This led to a girl saying that plants only move if acted upon by another source (i.e. the wind). That led to another person saying that she visited a sunflower patch with her mom and that the sunflowers move to follow the path of the sun. I love those kind of "thinking and sharing" arguments :) In our standards students only have to know five characteristics that organisims share. I made a Promethean flipchart that covers the five ...

I woke up this morning to find out that this blog has 501 followers. WOW! I remember being excited about my first follower and then my 100th follower (Shout out to Ginger Snaps!). Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to "follow" this blog. You give me the motivation to keep looking for and adding cool notebooking and school ideas.

In an earlier post I noted that one of the two schools I work out have an inspection/assessment team coming in at the end of the month. I have been working with teachers and parent volunteers helping to get student work out in the hall and generally make our walls "pop" for visitors. This is something I actually enjoy doing and I enjoyed it when I was a classroom teacher but I understand how time consuming it is. I spent many late nights at school putting together an awesome display only to replace it the next month. Time is definitely at a premium at this school and making wall displays is pretty low on most teachers lists (except the super crafty teachers and even they are coming in early, staying late, or working on the weekends to put something up). This has got me thinking about displays that can be left up all year. I wrote about this earlier in regards to science wall displays . Now my focus has shifted to the social studies teachers. I thought it would be a good idea...

This short (5 minute) video walks the viewer on how to put together the popsicle puzzle project. To see the tech part of it, please see an earlier video on the subject.

Here is a short video (4 minutes) explaining how to do the tech part of the popsicle puzzle project.