Flying Reindeer? Nope! Flying Cups and Reindeer

Sunday, December 8, 2019

Good morning!

This post is going to be short and to the point.  We just wanted to share our Flying Cup Part 2 experiment.  Our students were super excited and engaged, once again, each afternoon last week.  Even when they were synthesizing their results from part 1 and part 2, as well as what they learned about forces, gravity and mass, to draw a conclusion about why their cup landed the way it did.  The discussions were lively and rich.  We wish we you could have heard them.

After discovering that the cup landed mostly on its side in part 1, the new challenge was to get the cup to mostly land on its top or bottom.  They only materials they could use were pennies (no more than 10) and something to attach the pennies to the cup.  They all chose masking tape; however, they could have chosen liquid glue, hot glue, scotch tape, duct tape, electrical tape, or pipe cleaners.

The set-up

Scientific method written in science notebooks

Group data

One group's design

Analyzing results to draw a conclusion and wrote a reflection.
This was a guided lesson because of the rigor of the writing task.

Only one team's cup landed mostly on its side.  They concluded, with the help of the class, that it was because they put the pennies around both the top outside rim and the bottom outside rim of the cup.  This added even more mass to the already heavy side of the cup.  Therefore, that is where it mostly landed.  Other groups loaded up the very bottom of the cup or the very top of the cup with pennies.  Since that allowed the top or bottom of the cup to have the most mass, that is where the cup landed mostly.

This group's landed mostly on its side, however they had a great argument for why they thought this would meet the challenge.  They thought putting the mass at both ends would guarantee that it land on either the top or bottom.

Not only did the reading on hyper doc assist in our students' learning, the Study Jam videos in this hyper doc did, as well.  The first and last videos were the most relevant to our lessons and experiments.  In fact, one student went home and wrote another journal entry with diagrams and labels about forces, acceleration and mass.  His mother was so impressed.  We are waiting for permission to share that entry with you.  Receiving that email early this morning made our Sunday even more special than it normal.

Next lesson--apply the concepts of force and motion and gravity and friction to robotics.

Another fun activity we did this week was our geometry reindeer.  This lesson was created by Amy Lemons.  You can find it on teachers pay teachers.  We wanted to take a break from 2-step problem solving and the distributive property in math.

Filled with activities.

One of our favorite activities and displays for the season.

Next week we are going to review 3-D shapes with a stem activity called Snowman Stretch.  We found the idea on the KT Feel-Good Teaching website and combined it with the What Did The Shape Say 3-D templates and speech bubbles.  We are looking forward to the thrilling sounds we will hear during math on Tuesday.  Pictures to come next week.

She has a TpT store, too.

We did not get to our scarecrow activities.  That will begin on Monday, so hopefully we will have pictures to share next weekend, in addition our snowman stretch pictures.  We are also in the middle of our Anansi the Spider cinquains.  We will share those activities along with a Christmas Spider legend and ornament next weekend.

Once again, we cannot wait to get back to school on Monday to dive into the fun activities we have planned for the kids.

Have a super week... only a few left before winter break.

Kim and Anne

PS: We began our morning warm-ups with these December Welcome Messages created by The Curriculum Corner.  The best part about them were the quotes at the top of the page.  Anne and I are trying so hard to convince the kids that mistakes and failures are good because it means they are learning something new, and the quotes this week happened to reinforce those messages from us.  check them out!

Scarecrows...? December...? Yep!

Sunday, December 1, 2019

Anne and I have so much to post that we could not fit it all in on our last entry.  So, I'm up early on Sunday morning just itching to share some of our scarecrow ideas.

Before Thanksgiving break my literacy group read the poem Scarecrow by an unknown author.  The first read was to get the gist of the meaning of the poem and ask some questions.  (Questioning has been our reading strategy focus.) The second read was focused on finding strong verbs in the poem and their synonyms.  (Strong verbs has been our grammar focus).  I wanted to introduce connotative and denotative word meanings.

Poem link!

The students identified a few different groups of synonyms from the poem.

saw/observed/watched

surprised/astonished

flow/wave/dangle/shove/shake

I wanted to focus on the last set of verbs, and I did accept wave even though it is used as a noun in this poem.  We discussed how it could be used as a verb.

After identifying the synonyms, I showed a PowToons video explaining connotative and denotative word meanings.  The kids were super excited to be learning something new about words.  All of our students love noticing amazing words and using them.  Now, they know they can be more specific with their word choices.

I wanted the students to practice thinking about the connotative meanings of words and arrange them in order from most positive to most negative or from the strongest meaning to a more subtle meaning of the word.

We began by arranging pictures.  These pictures were created by TheBookWrangler.

I chose a few groups of pic, glued them to construction paper, and the kids arranged them!  So fun.

Next week, the students will look up the meanings of the last 5 verbs listed above and try to put them in order from the strongest (negative) meaning to the most subtle (positive) meaning.  Then, they will work with a partner to organize a different set of words.  Eventually, the groups will combine their word lists with the words going from strongest to weakest and synonyms to antonyms on "Word Thermometers."

The second poem, titled The Scarecrow Goat was Nuzzled in His Tattered Coat by an unknown author will be used to identify amazing words.  After looking up some of the meanings, the kids will make vocabulary scarecrows to display.  We also have discussion questions the students will use to gain a deeper understanding of the poem.  Anne's literacy group is going to use a different poem titled Scarecrow by Kristin Riley.

Here is a link for this poem.

Here are more discussion questions.

If you have not checked out the website Ideas by Jivey you must!  She has a wealth of literacy knowledge and her website and TpT store is a treasure trove of resources.  We are going to use her mentor text unit The Scarecrow by Beth Ferry to focus on compound sentences and combining sentences to make our writing stronger.  

This is a beautiful story of an unlikely friendship between a baby crow and the scarecrow.  The plot moves along through all four seasons as we get to know the scarecrow and his feelings about the crow.  The ending is heartwarming and a few tears may flow as you read it to your students.   

I have not planned this yet, but I'm thinking this poem might be good to use to do a compare/contrast activity with the book.  If not, then some other poem we are reading could be used for a comparison activity.

We will wrap up with the Christmas Scarecrow poem.  This is the poem we will dive deep into inferring the author's meaning and figurative language (personification).  

This site might be cute for making scarecrows, but I love Red Tag Art!  Look there for incredible crafts to accompany your literacy lessons.

Next up...spiders.  In December?  Yep!

Kim and Anne