Sixth Grade Funnies

I have been splitting my time lately between an ELD Fourth Grade class and a Sixth Grade Science Class. Now while I am enjoying teaching both... I LOVE SIXTH GRADE!

My mentor is "high energy" or as her students say "insane." BUT you have to love her. She is just so cute and fun! Plus I have never had so much fun in Science. Shhhh! Don't tell but science is on my short list of boring subjects. Until now...

Anyways... tomorrow is Monday and I am so excited! How can anyone be excited about a Monday? Well.. its easy in Sixth Grade. Starting the first week of March, the countdown for AIMS (our standardized testing) begins. In addition, Spring Break is thrown in there just to mess with the teacher's mind and to keep things interesting.

So how does one deal with the insanity? By starting the Monday Funny Video tradition! Every Monday from now until the end of AIMS, she plays a funny video just because. Here is last week's:

Its only 25 seconds so she played it twice. We were all laughing so hard. My favorite part of the day is when the social studies teacher came down the hall and said "what does a screaming goat have to do with science?" And my mentor answered "nothing! Its just funny."

Have you ever seen a bunch of sixth graders walking down the hall and randomly screaming like a goat? Oh my! It still makes me laugh! And the laughs didn't end on Monday either! It kept going all week long. The students found more goat videos and shared them with each other on Schoology.

It was amazing how much more relaxed and how much we got accomplished in 45 minutes when everyone was relaxed. Wanna know what we are watching this week??

We are classifying animals and this one was suggested by our students for this week's video. Plus, they are working on cause and effect in Language Arts. This is a great tie in and funny too!

How do you mange the insanity leading up to Spring Break and Standardized Testing?

National Geographic

So my last class was all about Social Studies and Geography. It is finals week so I can finally share with all of you some of the great resources I discovered during the course.

Did you know National Geographic has an Education Website? 

It Does!

This site covers current events! It has lessons plans, videos, a map creator, pictures, student resources, access to standards, and so much more! I have added it to the resource section of my own classroom website for my students to use. 

This is a brand new resource and still in BETA format. So if there are any suggestions of changes, things you want to see, etc...just let them know. 

ENJOY!

The Incredible Edible Cell

My son came home the weekend before Winter Break with information on how to complete a project that was worth 40% of his grade. This was on a Friday and the project was due on a Monday. Now normally I would complain about not receiving advanced notice from my children about such a thing but the paper was dated on Friday.

The teacher gave NO NOTICE!

This is a pet peeve of mine. We live paycheck to paycheck... well we did when we were working. Now we have no income and a giant project due on Monday. The school is aware of our circumstances yet no help with this project was given. Sigh... 

To further irritate me, he was given a rubric with little to no information on what to do and was given the advice to google for help. So I googled. I found a lot of information on the Incredible Edible Cell Project. This site is particular good for information on cells.

We were also told no jello. 

Most edible cells are made out of jello. 

Alternatives I found were a cake and a pizza. Since he got extra credit for creativity, we came up with the idea of a cookie and a pie as well. We went with a pie.

How to make...

Using the site I gave you above we had a pretty good idea of how to put the pie together. We filled the pie crust with chocolate pudding. Then we used a melon-baller to make just the right size in the orange to insert the peanut butter cup. Then we stuck the nucleus (orange) into our pudding pie. We surrounded it with the other items and finally labeled it with toothpicks.

WALA... one edible cell!

The pictures make a backwards L in the order in which we added the items so you can kinda see step-by-step what we did. For the tooth-pick labels I cut strips out of index cards, folded the strips in half, and the stuck the toothpick in gluing the two sides together. 

What we used... 

Cell membrane = Graham Cracker Crust 

Nucleus = Inside of the Orange 

Nucleolus = Reese Mini PB Cup 

Nuclear Membrane = Orange Peel

Cytoplasm = Chocolate Pudding 

Smooth E.R. = Gummy Worms 

Rough E.R. = Sour Gummy Worms 

Golgi Bodies = Blue Laffy Taffy

Ribosomes = Candy Sprinkles

Mitochondrion = Twix

Vacuoles = Chocolate Chips

Lysosomes = Orange M&M’s

Centrosomes = Marshmallow 

Cost: about $50! 

And I already had some of the ingredients on hand (sprinkles, chocolate chips. marshmallows, and M&M's). I also bought as much as I could from Dollar Tree (Twix, Gummy Worms, & Sour Gummy Worms). Sigh...

Cute... fun... expensive project 

and yep... 

He got an A!

Creepy Things - FREEBIE

Ahhh... or week is almost done only 2 more days of Free Halloween fun! Are you almost done planning for the holiday next week?

EEK! Spiders! Since I live in Arizona... I have a first hand acquaintance with the black widow. I just wish she would choose to live somewhere else than my garage! GROSS!

Thankfully, Jen at The Teacher's Cauldron has friendly spiders in her classroom!

This is a great fun spelling activity for Halloween and best of all... It's free. She includes 2 different versions in the download.

The day after Halloween, the kids are hyped on sugar and are not quite over the excitement of the holiday. For this reason, I like to continue activities throughout the week. So while we may not be reading ghost stories... creepy crawlies are a perfect thing to study instead. It helps them burn off that holiday excitement while moving forward!

Aren't these ghosts adorable? This matching game is free from Miss V's Busy Bees. I used them this past week with my kiddos and had them spell out their spelling words with them. They loved it! I am thinking of using it for a boggle game next week. So many uses for things...

Stop by tomorrow for the final day of Halloween Freebie Week!

Guest Post: Thematic Work Stations (Weather)

Author Bio: Today’s guest post comes from Toni, an elementary school teacher with a specialty in differentiated instruction and designing hands-on lessons that incorporate the multiple intelligences. You can often find Toni writing for TeacherLingo.com, where teachers can buy and sell their original lesson plans, worksheets, and more. She is married to a middle school math teacher and is a mom to a mystery loving 7 year old sweetie-girl and a quirky little light saber toting 3 year old.

There never seems to be enough time to fit everything into the school day! By developing weekly workstations, or centers, around a common theme you can, ‘kill two birds with one stone”. What does this look like in practice?

Each week whatever topic your class is studying in the content areas becomes the theme for your student workstations; like weather or elections. As students move from center to center they will review the week’s content area topic while simultaneously practicing the five essential elements of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Let’s look at a week of weather unit thematic workstations to see how this would look in practice.

In the phonemic awareness thematic workstation your students will work with the distinct sounds in spoken words. This workstation should include poems, rhymes, and songs about the weather along with task cards to go with each. Task cards may have them complete various activities like highlight the words that rhyme in the poem or clap the syllables in all the weather words mentioned in the song. The phonics thematic workstation should give your students the opportunity to examine and manipulate the sounds between letters as well as phonemes, or individual sounds.

You may set up a weather chart and have students focus on weather words with the ‘y’ ending like stormy, sunny, and rainy by writing and giving weather reports. Students may spell their weather words using magnetic letters or dry erase boards while awaiting their turn to give the weather report.

The main objective of the fluency thematic workstation is for students to practice reading text accurately and with proper prosody. Even the most fluent readers often struggle to read nonfiction text effortlessly. A weather reader’s theatre can be used in this station with each student in the center being assigned a part. If the equipment is available allow students to record themselves reading the reader’s theatre. Give each student a fluency checklist so they can self-assess as they watch their performance. Students may also buddy read both fiction and non-fiction books to practice their fluency.

Students will review weather unit words and their meanings in the vocabulary thematic workstation. A flannel board with each weather vocabulary word labeled and displayed gives students the opportunity to interact with the vocabulary as they tell and write stories using their weather words. Weather projects that reinforce the weather vocabulary are also a fun addition to this workstation. Students may review cloud vocabulary by making each type of cloud with cotton balls or puffy paint and then labeling and describing each. You may also have students make weather vocabulary booklets or complete weather word graphic organizers for further vocabulary practice.

The comprehension thematic workstation should allow students to practice both literal and inferential comprehension. This is a perfect workstation for students to reread or listen to the science textbook or weather themed picture books and then answer comprehension questions. The comprehension workstation may also be set up as a research station where students can study a weather topic of interest and show what they have learned by creating a weather game, writing a report or giving a presentation.

Simple weather experiments may also be set up at this center to allow students the opportunity to make predictions and inferences. While the workstations should keep students busily learning while you work with small groups, there are always fast finishers.

To keep everyone busy you may assign a larger project at the beginning of the week that students may work on independently at their seat each day as they complete their work station activities. You may also set up an area of the room with some extra weather themed books, games and activities for speedy students to choose from.

Tombstone, Arizona

Each summer, I like to play tourist and also educate my boys in something new. I took them to Rawhide awhile back and posted about our adventures. Since my boys are still into the "Wild West" - we decided to take them on a trip to a real Wild West Town.

Tombstone was founded in 1879 by Ed Schieffelin who had several silver minds down there. This was prior to Arizona even being a state and Tombstone was hoping to be the capital (that honor went to Prescott). It was one of the largest cities in the nation at during the late 1800s. Hard to believe isn't it?

This old town should have died off a long time ago but thanks to the infamous Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday... it remains a tourist attraction and town today. It is also the site of many western towns you see in movies.

Anywho...

Doc Holiday's Gunfight Palace

My little cowboys were blood thirsty so we stopped at the first place to offer a gun fight. Let me tell ya now... Tombstone is an expensive place to take a family!!! It cost us $26ish (hubby was in charge of the money) to see this indoor gun fight. If you go, skip it. The place is the size of your classroom, it is hard to see and just not worth the money. My kids missed it all. Hubby took this by raising his hand, pushing the button and hoping for the best.

We went during Memorial Day weekend not realizing it was Wyatt Earp Days. It was crowded but not overly so and we had the bonus of there being free gun fight shows in the street.

The boys had a blast with all of the gun fights... and they even got in on the action.

This is the main event and why people visit Tombstone. The OK Corral where the infamous gun battle happened. This was EXPENSIVE! When you purchase these tickets, you also get admittance into two other sites (Historama and the Epitaph Museums). It was a 45 minute show and the boys loved this.

I was particularly impressed with the Good Enough Mine Tour. First, they offer a discount to teachers, military, and anyone who services the community ($8 off) and anyone under 10 is free. It was the favorite thing we did perhaps even better than the gun fights. My middle son "stole" (the prospector told him to) the prospectors gun and held him up AND it was a real gun (loaded with blanks!).

So here are the stars going down, down, down into the mine. There are not any monsters or ghosts that live in this mine but according to my littlest one there are zombies.

No worries... he has his cap gun and his daddy!

See all that gray stuff on the walls... THAT'S SILVER! We learned a lot about minerals, mining, the way one used to see in the dark, lead and food poisoning.... hmmm... what else!

This is a pile of silver before it is made into pretty shiny things.

The last thing we did (after I shredded my knee in a blonde moment) was to visit Boot Hill. What an interesting cemetery.  Just look at this gravestone. Where else would you see something like this? Almost all of the graves said how they died.

Traditionally on Memorial Day weekend, we attend a service remembering our fallen soldiers but I felt like my children were missing the history behind why our country and our state is so important. This trip allowed them to learn more about our freedoms, the birth of our state and country, and to understand why it is important to protect it. If you plan on going for the day, plan on spending $100 per person.

Thank you to all of those who serve our country! We will be thinking of you, your families, and your sacrifices as without you, we wouldn't be able to enjoy moments like this.

Guest: The Science Penguin

I am excited about what April has in store for all of you!! I have asked some amazing teachers to join me this month to share with you their best tips about teaching. In addition to that, they all have something FREE to share.

First up... THE SCIENCE PENGUIN! This is a hidden treasure in the blog world. Not many people have stumbled across this blog to see the treasures within. I am telling you all now... you need to follow Ari!!

She has an absolutely AMAZING way to teach science in only 20 minutes a day. It is hands-on and engaging. It reminds me of the Daily 5 and CAFE but for science. I am in love!! But I will be quiet now and let Ari tell you in her own words.
 

I am SO excited to be guest blogging for Misty on Think, Wonder, & Teach! 

I'm Ari, AKA The Science Penguin.  I am a 5th grade math and science teacher in Texas. 

When I was in school, you had to practically pin me down to teach me science.  It was completely boring and had no practical uses.  When I was hired to teach 5th grade science in my first teaching job, I was extremely uncertain, but I grew to love it and became The Science Penguin!  It's so sad to me that with testing, laws, and mandates that science falls to the wayside in elementary classrooms.  However, all hope is not lost!


Here are five tips for teaching science to make it manageable, fun, and interesting!


1. Ditch the textbook.  If your textbook is anything like mine (a total snoozefest and extremely outdated), students will have no interest in reading anything in it.  I refuse to even get the science books out of the book room at the beginning of the year...just seeing them bores me to tears!


2. Use trade books and picture books to introduce units.  You can seamlessly integrate literacy skills like sequencing, summary, and predicting.  When I use a picture book with my students, I read it first just for the students to enjoy.  Then, I reread the book the next day and have them "listen like scientists".   I leave it to them to pick out the science concepts they think I want them to learn.  Afterward, we discuss the concepts they picked out, we clear up misconceptions, and I gauge what they already know about the concept.


3. Incorporate technology.  I don't have a lot of fancy technology in my classroom, but I do have computers!  There are some great websites out there with interactive activities and virtual labs, and the kids absolutely love them.  Also, student blogging is a way to help students communicate their understanding of science to each other and to you.  Involve community members that are experts in their fields and other teachers and administrators at your school in blogging as well.


4. Bring science to life!  Have students to do lab activities, explore the natural world, engage in inquiry lessons, and have hands-on experiences with the content.


5. Use learning stations and cooperative learning with students.  In the science program I created, The Science Weekly Five, students have predictable routines, but different units each week.  The kids complete one station each day of the week for a total of five stations per week.  They record their work in Student Recording Packets, which are the same for all of the different units.  With routines in place, this only takes 15 minutes a day!


The five stations are Reading and Comprehending (short reading passage and summarizing), Exploration (hands-on activity), Organize It! (graphic organizer), Center Activity (focus on one particular aspect of the unit), and Vocabulary (cut/paste matching and Vocabulary Four Square).


My students absolutely LOVE Science Weekly Five and other teachers that have tried it love it as well!    In celebration of my first guest blogging gig, I am giving away a *freebie* to the readers of Think, Wonder, & Teach!  On April 9 and 10 only, get your own Science Weekly Five Start-Up Kit for free!

The Science Weekly Five Start-Up Kit includes set-up information and tips, the Student Recording Packet, station signs and directions, grouping bookmarks, and the entire "Our Solar System" unit!  Head on over to The Science Penguin to get your freebie.  

Thanks again to Misty for inviting me over to Think, Wonder, & Teach!

Classroom Pet Grant

Teachers always need help in creating an intriguing atmosphere for their students to learn in. There are several discoveries I have come across lately to help set-up and then maintain an amazingly fun classroom. My latest discovery is:

Petsmart Classroom Pet grants!! How awesome would it be to have a pet in the class? I had a goldfish when I taught Kindergarten (years ago!) in a Mickey Mouse Aquarium. My students loved it!

I am thinking of getting a turtle... I really like this teeny tiny little guy. I can name him Ninja. He will protect me and my students from boredom! Never fear Tiny Ninja is near! (My son's are rolling their eyes at me again!)