Fun Science Activities with Reading and Writing

Saturday, October 26, 2013

It felt good to have a full week of school!  Sometimes short weeks are more challenging than full ones.  Don't get us wrong, we're exhausted, but a good exhausted.

Reading and writing revolved around science this week. We are wrapping up our science unit on the solar system. The students loved this unit, and enthusiastically participated in all activities. Mensa For Kids puts out great science activities to learn about the moon, and we did several of them. We did an experiment to discover why the moon has craters and why they are different sizes, we read interesting facts about the moon and rated them, and then we made a model of a moon using water colors and wrote about it.

The constellations were a big hit as well. We used the jigsaw strategy when reading a book about the stars. The students had to highlight important information the author wanted them to learn, and then each group shared information about their chapter with the rest of the class. A fun hands-on activity was making constellation tubes and star finders. To check their understanding we did a five minute power write about constellations.

The solar system was the final topic in our unit. Using the game twenty questions, the students had to guess what was in the two giant garbage bags. A blow-up sun and planets were in the bag. The students went crazy! We sang a song to help us put the planets in order. You probably have heard the song before, but here it is. It is sung to the tune Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. We don't know who wrote the song, so we can't give credit where credit is due. Every time we placed a new planet in its order, we sang the song, because this was the target goal for the lesson.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars,

These are the planets among the stars

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus too

Neptune, Pluto

Now we're through

Planets are in the Milky Way

This is what we learned today.

Yes, we know Pluto is not a planet anymore, and the students remind us of that constantly, but it goes with song, and Pluto is still there.

We found a cute new art project on Pinterest to help us remember the order of the planets. Last year we made a candy model, this year it was a construction paper model.

The planets can orbit around the sun.  They have to hold onto one leg of the brad and spin the black paper.

We also watched this very entertaining movie from YouTube. The speakers' accents are a little difficult to understand, but the students didn't seem to have a problem with it, and it does have some cool facts.

Next week we will tell you about our Snapple-Lid Reading Party.  It was great fun and we learned about it at the Smekens' conference!!!

Kim and Anne

Short Week, Short Blog, Good Stuff

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Last weekend we were able to finish our lesson plan that goes with the story The Bremen Town Musicians retold by Carol Pugliano-Martin.   If you would like to check it out here is the link: The Bremen Town Musicians.

We attended a great workshop on Thursday through Smekens Education Solutions Inc. It was titled, Strategies for Teaching Reading With Small Group Instruction. The presenter, Kristi McCullough has a wealth of knowledge. Her ideas were appropriate for grades two through six and could be readily implemented. This was the same company that put on the writing conference that Kim went to in August, and this one was just as inspiring as that one. As Kim mentioned before, if you ever have a chance to go to one of their workshops, jump on it! Here is the link to their website: Smekens Education Solutions Inc.

One of the teachers in our building found a great website that unpacks the Common Core State Standards for all grade levels.  We found this to be so useful because it makes the vague language of the CCSS more understandable.  We hope you find this site as useful as we did.

Another thing we keep reading and hearing about concerning the Common Core is teachers using exemplar texts with their students.  These texts are samples of the complexity and rigor of the texts the students will be required to read and comprehend on the PARCC assessment.  We found a website that has these texts as well as activities that accompany them.  Here is the site: Exemplar Texts and Tasks.

Next week we will be back with some fun activities we did with our students.  It's a full week with zero interruptions so hopefully we will have a lot to share with you.

Kim and Anne

Lots of Independent Work and Facilitation

October 12, 2014

Hi everyone. It was another busy week for us. This week we challenged our students to read and engage in comprehension activities with a partner while we facilitated. We supported them as they struggled through the learning process, but in the end, everyone was proud of their accomplishments and hard work.

We spent a lot of time wrapping up the concept of day and night. When we teach our astronomy unit at the beginning of the year, this concept is very challenging for our students. We did many hands-on activities, and reading and writing activities to hopefully solidify why we have night and day. The Aims Math and Science site has a great activity called Dizzy Spells that not only teaches day and night, but also addresses where the sun is in the sky during different times of the day.

After several hands-on activities, the students went online to read about why we have day and night. Previously, we had taught the skill of sketch-to-stretch to help us visualize nonfiction information when we were reading about the sun, so this time we wanted students to apply this strategy while reading with a partner. Partners had to first read the text, and then go back for a close reading, to decide what information was important and what they needed to know. They then sketched this important information.

Our final activity with day and night was to make the well known model of the sun and earth, with the earth rotating on its axis to show night and day. Students then had to demonstrate their understanding by writing about what makes day and night in their science notebooks.

Doing a close read of A Walk in the Desert by Caroline Arnold to find the main idea and details was the next challenge for our students. Of the five paragraphs they had to analyze, two of them were done whole group. The other three were completed with a partner. Students worked hard to infer the main idea with two of the paragraphs.

You would think that all this hard work would tire our students out, but they were actually energized by  their success. Thank goodness, because we were really hesitant to let them do these activities on their own. However, we know that the latest discussions about reading instruction place importance on having students working with more complex texts and tasks.  It also spotlights having students engage in meaningful conversations with their peers. This promotes deep understanding of what has been read.

Our last challenge about did us in! We introduced five different kinds of leads to our students. We found books that had an example of each type of lead, and students had to work with their table mates to identify them. This was much more difficult than we thought it would be! We found ourselves literally cheering when they got one right. As if that wasn't challenging enough, we thought we would push them a little more. In their groups, they had to write their own examples of each type of lead. It was really hard, and they needed a lot of support, but we got through it! As we began our class narrative, they chose to use an Imagine This lead. Because of their independent practice, we were able to come together as a class to write a very detailed introduction to our narrative writing.

Next week is an unusual week for us. The students are off on Tuesday and Wednesday while we have School Improvement meetings, and then we are at a reading conference on Thursday. So, we will only see our students one day. In our blog next week, we will share articles and any good things we learned at the conference.

Kim and Anne

October 5, 2013

Good morning! We hope everyone is doing well. This week we completed our Henry and Mudge unit, a cute writing poem project, science with UV beads, and we also started our Global Read Aloud project!

Our revamping of the Henry and Mudge lesson for our independent readers was a huge success. They are getting closer to the learning target of understanding direct and indirect characterization. Completing the character web together using the book, Henry and Mudge Take the Big Test,  helped make finding evidence to infer character traits more concrete. Another thing that helped was giving them a list of character traits to use when partner reading other Henry and Mudge books. They were able to use those traits to find evidence to match them.

Reading for trait evidence.

Working hard on this challenge.

Like the pieces of  a puzzle, a character's traits fit together to make him who he is.

Power writing to reflect on what we've learned.

Our more guided group used the story board to write a retelling of Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night. The story board truly helped them retell the story through the use of their retelling bag.

Our writing this week focused on ideas and details through writing a list poem. The students got a kick out of listening to the Shel Silverstein poem, "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out," and the Jack Prelutsky poem, "Bleezer's Ice Cream." We used these poems to introduce list poems that are organized with a beginning, middle, and end. Then, students wrote their own list poems about themselves and made their portraits.

First drafts with revisions.

We can't thank Steve Spangler enough for all of his creative and inviting science lessons. Once again our students were totally engaged in the scientific method as they learned about the UV rays from the sun.

In the classroom; no uv rays, in the sun, in the shade.

Our Global Read Aloud started this week! Our students loved listening to the book, Marty McGuire by Kate Messner. But, the best part for them was blogging about their thoughts. They cannot wait to hear back from their second grade friends in North Carolina!

Signing off now to go and plan more fun activities for next week!
Kim and Anne

September 28, 2013

Hi everyone! It is hard to believe it is already the end of September. This first month of school just flew by! This week, for the first time, we shared our students for shared reading. This is a typical year, where the range of our students' reading abilities varies greatly. We find it beneficial to sometimes split the students into two different shared reading groups to better meet their needs. One group gets a more guided, supported reading lesson, while the other group gets a higher level, more independent lesson.

With our more guided group, we used our Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night  Teachers Pay Teachers lesson. We haven't completed it yet, but here is the start of our storyboard. There are many more activities in this lesson plan. Check out our Teachers Pay Teachers store.

For our other group, we decided to use Henry and Mudge books to teach characterization. We introduced the students to direct and indirect characterization through the song You're a Mean one, Mr. Grinch.

We then had students choose their own Henry and Mudge book to read, and the plan was for them to complete the same type of character trait chart on Henry. However, this was too big of a jump for them to do independently. So, we are revising our original plans, and are going to have the students complete a character web before they infer Henry's traits. We think this will make the activity more concrete for them before jumping into such a difficult task.

For a fun way to reinforce our word block lesson on magic e words, we had the students make hink pinks. They loved listening to the hink pink riddles in the book, What Do You Call a Rhyming Riddle? by the fifth-grade students from St. Joseph Montessori School, and they had a great time writing their own hink pinks afterwards.

Two days this week we were out of the classroom for Fountas and Pinnell individual testing with our students. This is a new assessment for us. We also plan on giving our students the Basic Reading Inventory (BRI) by Jerry Johns in the next few weeks. This is our tried and true favorite informal assessment to give the students.

Have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne

Sensational Science

September 21, 2013

Reading and writing expository texts about scientists and space was fun for our students this week. We know with the Common Core more complex, informational text needs to be incorporated into our lessons, and we have tried to connect this reading to hands-on, engaging activities to hook our students.

We got to implement another one of our teachers pay teachers lessons, Exploring Space With an Astronaut by Patricia J. Murphy. Using the picture sort to generate main idea and details was a concrete way to introduce this skill. During our close read of the text, students were able to use the headings to find clues to the main idea of each section. We had students look for the main idea, usually found in the first sentence, and underline it in orange crayon. Then, they underlined supporting details in yellow. To challenge them, we also included one section where the main idea had to be inferred. We ended this lesson with an art project where students had to write one main idea and two details on their space scene.

Two different picture sets students worked with.

We also read more about being a scientist. We wanted the students to gather information from multiple sources to answer the questions: What is a scientist? and What do scientists do? Students first read the book, What Do Scientists Do? by Daniel Jacobs. They had to take notes on what they felt was important. They also read a Keynote that Kim created to gather more information. When they finished the Keynote, they went to this great website from PBS where students could listen to real scientists talking about their jobs. We bought sticker scenes from Oriental Trading for the students to create a picture of scientists working in a lab, and finally, they wrote a list with a repeated line explaining what scientists do. Our repeated line was A scientist..., which was a great way to reinforce the concept of complete sentences needing subjects. We are also planning to use this writing as a springboard into list poems next week.

This is one page of the Keynote.

Again, we wish you a happy, relaxing weekend. We'll talk to you next week!

Kim and Anne

September 13, 2013

Hi everyone. We're writing the blog on Friday because we have so many commitments this weekend, so we're going to make it short and sweet.

We did a follow-up activity to our Orb experiment this week. Students had to come up with their new question to test with the orbs. Some students chose to put the orbs in ice water, salt water, Dr. Pepper, tea, or oil. Amazing results occurred and fascinated our students. It led them to even more questions they wanted to test. They were thrilled when we gave them orbs to take home, and many came back the next day discussing their new experiments and results. This has been such a motivating way to introduce the scientific method.

Orbs in Oil.  Nothing happened, but we had a great discussion on why.

We've had an independent reading program, called Buzzing, for years. We even did an action research project using our Buzzing program, and the results proved what we already knew. Kids who consistently read outside of the classroom for thirty minutes or longer, and discuss their reading in small peer groups, or buzz groups, make significant gains in their reading abilities. Our buzzing is getting underway nicely. We made a Buzzing I-Chart, and a Reading Is Thinking Chart to help the process. The Buzzing I-Chart helps the students become aware of what their responsibilities are during these discussion times. The Reading Is Thinking Chart has helped students discuss more than just the focus question of the day. That chart was generated after students participated in a shared reading activity where we introduced being metacognitive while reading. We introduced five reading strategies and their codes so we could mark our thinking spots as we read. These two charts, along with our joining in a buzzing group each day to help model and facilitate good discussions have helped lead to our successful start. We think students are offering more thoughts and insights in their discussions.

Close reading has been given a lot of attention recently. Here is an article explaining more about close reading, and some of the misconceptions about it. After reading the article, we think buzzing really can be considered a form of close reading because students are going back to their texts to talk about specific parts of it. The focus questions allow them to hone in on different ideas.

We're off now for a busy weekend. We hope you enjoy yours!

Kim and Anne