Ahhh, spring break has begun. Our minds, as well as our students' minds, need to relax so we can get creative again. We worked crazy hard to tie up loose ends and bring our landform unit to a close. Below you will find our "loose ends" and "wrap ups."
First up, are our activities with our landform unit. We wanted the students to learn about erosion and weathering because that connected with our reading series story called Soil, and our social studies unit on landforms. These words can be difficult to understand, so we had the students engage in some hands on activities to make their learning more concrete.
We had the students make a mountain out of ten sugar cubes. Then, they placed drops of water on the same spot on their mountain and observed what happened.
Then, we used the Notebook software to create a four square vocabulary page for the words weathering and erosion.
Our students cheered when we brought out Milky Way candy bars for another hands-on experiment from Super Science Magazine. We used them to demonstrate how a mountain is made from flat land. We gave the students a picture of the layers of the earth, and asked the question: How does flat land become a mountain? They had to write a hypothesis for this question, and some of them were hysterical. Some students thought dust just piled up into a mountain. We cut the Milky Way in half and students had to observe how the inside of a Milky Way was similar to the inside of the Earth. Then we discussed in more detail about the crust, the mantel, and the core. The students pressed on the top of their whole Milky Way with their thumb. Once they did that, we talked about the movement of tectonic plates. Finally, the students placed their fingers on the short sides of the Milky Way and squished them together, noticing how the "tectonic plates" rose and folded together. They then used words like jagged and rough to describe their mountain. They wrote their conclusion of how mountains formed in their science journal.
All of this led to our final wrap up during shared reading, when we once again split our students into two groups. Our more guided group read the story, The Sun, the Wind, and the Rain by Lisa Westberg Peters. After partner reading, they did a close read together and compared Elizabeth's mountain to the earth's mountain. This was a challenge.
Our more independent group read The Mountain That Loved a Bird by Alice McLerran. This group would partner read a few pages and then prepare for whole group discussion by answering some discussion questions. We tried to make our questions higher level, and we wanted students to support their answers with evidence from the text.
Some of the wrap-ups in word block included activities with prefixes and multiple meaning words. After several read-alouds of the Amelia Bedelia books by Peggy Parish, we made our own multiple meaning book using templates created by Mrs. Patmore.Our Multiple Meaning Word Book
For prefixes, we began with a word sort with words that had the prefixes un, mis, pre, and re. Then, we brainstormed more words and played the game Roll It, Say It, Spell It. After students wrote the word they rolled, they had to use it in a sentence. To further solidify their understanding, we made a foldable for their reading notebooks so they could refer back to the meanings.
Finally, one of our colleagues came up with a great authentic writing activity for persuasive writing. We read the book, I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff, and discussed how the main character was trying to persuade his mother for an iguana. Then, students wrote their own persuasive letters to their parents, and their parents wrote back all week long. Some students were excited that their parents actually said yes by Friday.
Kim and Anne
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