One year ago when we began our blog, our purpose was to share creative, motivating, yet effective ideas you could easily incorporate into your classroom. Hopefully you have found some of them useful. Recently we came upon something called Bright Ideas Blog Hop. Teachers blog about tips, tricks and ideas that have worked well in their classrooms. When you are finished reading one blog, it links you to the next idea blog in the hop. We just found this yesterday and already we have new ideas about our writing mentor text bulletin board, two great math place value and problem solving ideas, and our favorite one called Table Top Twitter! We thought we'd get you started hopping with this blog site.
Happy Hopping!
We are not part of the Bright Idea Hop just yet, but here are two ideas from our classrooms that you may want to use with your students.
The Aims Education Foundation is one of our favorite resources to use when we want to enrich and deepen our math and science curriculums. This week we used an old version of What Do You Sink Will Float? (Darn it! We didn't see this new and nicer version in time). This was used to enrich our students' understandings of properties of solids. It also forced them to change their thinking of the reasons why an object will sink or float. Originally all of the students believed it was based on the object's weight. After weighing each object, predicting which would sink or float, and then testing each object, we were shocked to find out that a tiny paperclip that weighed less than a gram would sink, while the pencil that weighed 5 grams floated. The students soon thought about the material each object was made of and wondered if that had something to do with whether it sunk or floated. This was a perfect segue into a discussion about density, which then will lead to an experiment about density.
Our second idea is our buzz log writing. In our classroom our students "buzz" about their nightly reading. Each night the students read a book that they have chosen. The following day they get into small groups of 3-4 students and discuss what is happening in their books, as well as their thoughts and the strategies they used while reading. Some days we extend that talk to writing about their reading. In their blue notebooks, our students write us a letter telling us what they talked about in their buzz groups. We believe a combination of talking and writing about their thoughts deepens their comprehension, as well as motivates them to read. Below are two buzz log entries. One is from the beginning of the year and the other is from recently. Notice the growth.
Again, we hope you can use some of the ideas we have presented her in this blog. We would love to hear your comments below.
Have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne
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