Hi everyone,
It is hard to believe that there is only one week of school left before winter break. There is so much to get done in these last few days! One thing we did finish was our Simple Machine Unit! We spent a little more than a trimester on this unit, but it was well worth it.
We thought what better way to wrap up this unit than to have our students become the teachers! Lately, we have spent much time focusing on main idea and important details with our kids. It can be challenging to find the main idea, and even more challenging to weed out the interesting details from the details that are most important to the main idea. Students really have to think critically about the text, which we think is so important. The students' task as teachers was going to focus on this skill.
Before we sent them off on their task, we once again addressed main idea and details in our shared reading. Together, we read the one page text, What Are Simple Machines? We had to find the main idea of the entire text, not just one paragraph. It was a little tricky, because the main idea really was in the second paragraph. After identifying the main idea sentence, we charted important details, and interesting details.
Then it was time for the students to switch roles in cooperative groups! Each group was assigned a different simple machine. First, they had to follow directions to make a quick three-dimensional paper model of their machine.
Once they finished making their model, they moved on to reading a one page text about their machine. Their job was to read the text, identify the main idea, important details, and interesting details and create a chart about their simple machine. They would use this chart to teach the class about it. We were amazed with how hard they worked to dig deeper into the text to find the main idea. One group inferred a main idea that was much better than the one we had come up with! They also had great conversations about which details were the important ones.
After practicing their presentations, it was time to teach! The kids had a blast teaching to the class, and listening to the other presentations. It was a huge success!
During this unit, we visited two websites about simple machines during our computer lab time. One was a BBC website, and the other was Edheads. We thought you might like to check them out!
On another note, we found a super cute snowman craft online that the students made this week. This craft is going to serve two purposes for us- it will be our kids' parent gift and it will be used as a springboard for a writing activity that we will share next week!
Kim and Anne
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