Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

This is part of my "pull out" mania this year. I thought it would be fun for students to draw an environment complete with at least three animals and two plants and then discuss adaptations they have that help them survive in that environment on the pull out tab.

This idea was loosely based on something I saw on Pinterest . I had the child pick an animal at the top of the food chain and create a food chain inside its belly. In hindsight she probably didn't need to have the tiger represented (since it was already represented by the drawing). This would fall under 5th grade standards here in South Carolina and I am thinking of how it could be modified to represent fossil fuels in our energy unit.

Sorry I have been absent a bit this past month. With school winding down there has been a lot to do! I have been working on some right hand assignment ideas and borrowed some fourth graders to help me out. This one was adapted from a hallyway display I saw outside a second grade classroom (see third picture). I thought it could be easily adapted and used in a notebook.

I've recently become addicted to the Cornell Ornithology Lab here at this SITE . The site features live streaming of two web cams set up - one watching a red-tailed hawk nest and one watching over a blue heron nest. Both nests have fairly recently hatched young that can be observed.  I took screen shots of both nests above. You can even ask questions online to volunteers who man the IM board. I showed them to a second grade class I was covering and I had them make inferences about the weather, habitat, and eating habits based on what they could observe (the red tail hawk usually has some dead mouse or bird in the nest which always makes a site much "cooler" in the eyes of the kids). Careful when watching...it is VERY addictive :)

Here is a short video of a project I had to do in an Earth Science class I am taking (I am going for my second master's degree in Elementary Science Education and will hopefully be done next spring). The project required that teachers put together a "Wonder Box" of Earth science items and design a lesson plan around the box. This reminded me of a project I had done with fourth graders during my student teaching in Social Studies. I had students work in groups and they had to design a museum box that held "artifacts" of specific Native American tribes. I put together a short 1 minute 30 second video that highlights how I made my "Wonder Box" (or museum box) and how it can be done in a Social Studies class and how the activity can be incorporated into a notebook assignment. This could also be used in science. Student's can create a biome box and have artifacts of what might be found in that biome and why. Student's can create an animal box ...

This was a cute moon phases booklet that a teacher shared with me. She made it at a training and we were looking for the easiest way it could be done with her 80 fourth grade students (once we work it out I will post!).

Our state testing is a week earlier this year leaving us with four full weeks to remain academically engaged after our state testing (or as one teacher pointed out this morning - only four more Mondays!) Some teachers teach mini units that they weren't able to get to during the year (I know one teacher is teaching a unit about Pirates...in the context of Social Studies and ELA...and another is doing a science mystery unit where students have to lift fingerprints, test ink...in the context of scientific inquiry) I personally liked to do four weeks of projects where children can work at their own pace (as long as at the end of the month they completed the projects). I did it while I was in the classroom and enjoyed the self paced atmosphere of the classroom and the fact that everyone knew what they had to do. I basically served as a facilitator and occasional "task master." I usually played my Kidz Bop CD's while they worked and on Friday I declared it "educa...