Five For Friday October 31, 2014

Happy Halloween! Time to link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday! We have had a crazy busy fun filled week!  Lots of history and lots of candy make for an exhausting week!

My week started with a field trip for the Earth Science STEM class I am taking.  We all met at the Churchill County Museum in Fallon, NV (which we toured a bit before leaving) and then headed to a place called The Hidden Caves which were used by Native Americans.  It is the site of several archaeological digs, and they have opened it up to the public.  Here are a few pics from our visit:

 

 

 

 

Monday, I took my own class on a field trip to City Hall as part of our social studies curriculum.  They were able to meet and greet with the mayor and then take a tour of the building.  They had a ton of questions for our mayor!  They were also able to see voting in action as we are currently in the middle of early elections.

They were so surprised to see their teacher's picture on the wall (I am on the city council).

They even got bags of goodies!  They were filled with pencils, city pins, Nevada pins, along with candy and glow sticks.

We received dictionaries from the Rotary Club this week and they were so excited to each have their own!  They also noticed that there were resources in the dictionary such as a map of the United States, common conversions, and even a multiplication chart.  They were quite amazed by the longest word in the English language and were extremely thankful that I would not be putting it on our spelling test this week!

In Nevada, we celebrate Nevada Day on October 31st, so we actually have today off!  Yesterday we participated in a record breaking attempt at the most people singing Home Means Nevada as part of our state's 150th birthday celebration.

 

We also learned about the Pony Express - complete with a reenactment!  Photo creds to one of my third grade team members.

And since we have today off.. we celebrated with our Halloween party yesterday.

 

 

Be sure to link up and share your week as well!

What Are We Learning About? The Pony Express!

We live in Nevada and Nevada Day is on Halloween!  We now get the day off the Friday before, but we are still going to celebrate at school by having a Pony Express between our elementary school and another elementary school in town.  The students at each school are writing each other friendly letters which will be delivered via "Pony Express".  To get the students ready, I decided to have us learn a little bit more about the Pony Express.

To get the kiddos excited, and engaged we did a pre-activity where I had pictures in various spots around the room.  The students wrote down what they noticed and what they wondered about each picture.

 

Then we came back together to talk about what was written about each picture.

 

 

On one of the pictures someone had written, I wonder if there will be a fire.  That confused me a little, so he came up and showed me that there was a fire extinguisher in the picture.

See it?

It always amazes me the things they notice!

Then we wrote predictions about what we thought we were going to be learning about.

Some great guesses, and one of them hit the nail on the head.

 

 

Do you ever have your students guess your teaching topic ahead of time to build anticipation?  What other anticipation activities do you use?