5 For Friday - Oct. 30, 2015

It has been awhile since I've joined in with DoodleBugsTeaching for Five for Friday, but since I have the day off today in honor of Nevada Day, I really have no excuse not to!

In Nevada, we celebrate Nevada Day the Friday before the official Nevada Day (October 31st).  So, since today is a day off of school, we had our Halloween celebrations yesterday.  The kids had a blast!  I am not going to lie and say that Halloween is NOT my favorite day of the year as a teacher, but I do enjoy seeing them have a good time.

Because today is a holiday, we took our weekly math tests yesterday morning.  You could imagine my students' surprise when our principal (dressed as Sandra D), vice principal (dressed as a T-bird) , school secretaries (Pink Ladies), and school counselor (T-bird) burst into our room singing and dancing.

They had a little speaker with them that was playing You're The 

One I Want from Grease as they came in.  My students just sat there in shock.  As they walked out one of them said, "I think that song was from a movie." LOL!

I was able to attend the NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) conference last week and learned so much!  I can't wait to share the ideas with my students and also with you here on the blog. Stay tuned to Sunday's blog post for the science lesson I used with my students this week.

We have had a crazy few weeks as a family as well with Tyler's first Homecoming and Cody's first band concert.

In honor of Nevada Day, some of my fellow Nevada sellers have gotten together to throw a sale at our TPT stores.  My sale is running today and tomorrow.  You can visit my TpT store here.



Hope you have a great weekend and a Happy Halloween!

Five For Friday January 30, 2015

Time for Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching!

This week started with a weekend birthday celebration for my youngest son, Luke.  He turned 9!!!  Where does the time go?  We started the celebration at school with a little cake.

The his friend spent the night and the next morning we hit the mall and his favorite restaurant, Dave & Busters.

One of the things he bought were these magnetic earrings (the only way mom would you allow him to have any earrings!).

He loves jumping at the mall on these trampoline harness things!  What a daredevil!

And in case you were wondering, those bottles are rootbeer!

We practiced some fractions during small groups.  We worked on the idea that when the numerator and denominator are the same or equal, the fraction is equal to 1 whole.

Because I taught 7th grade math before switching to Elementary, I know that students are often afraid of big numbers because they are big.  I don't want my students to be intimidated later on down the road, so we often use big numbers to show that the rule is still the same.

And while we are at it, why not throw in a few variables to make things interesting?

She was so proud to be doing algebra! No math anxieties here!

We started a new read aloud this week - The One and Only Ivan.  I absolutely LOVE this book and so do the students!

 

 

In science we modeled layers of earth caused by erosion by mixing different types of soil in water and letting them settle.

The most exciting part of our week was the fact that we were published!  I decided this year to try out Student Treasures for one of our writing units.  The students chose our Fairy Tales unit to publish as a class book.  The books arrived this week and I couldn't have been more pleased with them!  They were very high quality and the students are so proud!

How was your week?

Learning About Windmills - STEM fun!

One of my fellow teachers and I have been taking a STEM class to help us integrate STEM into our curriculum.  As part of our class, we have been very lucky to receive a variety of resources, but our favorite so far has been a KidWind kit!

With the kit, our students have been able to design their own windmills with the following purposes:

1. A design that will lift the most weight.
2. A design that will create enough power (electricity) to turn on a small light bulb.

We started our lesson by allowing the students to play with the kits, designing windmills as they built them.

As they watched each team try out their designs, they made lots of observations and developed several theories.

Once they tested a few out, it was time to plan some re-design based on the observations they had made the day before.

I loved how some of the students used tools we had used in previous lessons (rulers and using centimeters) as they wrote out their plans.

Some used prior knowledge.

Here is a video of some of our students lifting washers with their windmill:


Our winning engineers who lifted the most weight.  They were so proud!

Here are some students creating electricity with their windmills.

You can order these kits here (you could also use it as a Donors Choose project!).  Or you could try to make a similar kit to the one shown below.  Our instructors from the STEM class ran our school's science night and brought these versions with them. They used wood dowels, closet rod, PVC pipe, swimming “noodles” cut 3 inches wide, a washer, and hot glue to make them.  

They poked barbecue skewers into the pool noodle and taped paper plates to them to make their windmill panels.

Have you integrated STEM into your classroom?  I'd love to hear what you've done!  If you have a blog post about it, be sure to leave a link in the comments below.