Science Leads To Writing

Sunday, October 2, 2016

We love kicking off the school year with science activities that lead the students through the scientific method. Steve Spangler is a great resource for us. His science ideas are always a big hit with our classes.

Our first activity involved water cubes. The students were presented with the question: What will happen when we put the cube in distilled water? They were amazed at the results. The water cubes grew to over 200 times their sizes! This activity led to other extension activities, such as, What will happen if we put them in colored water? What will happen if we stack the colored cubes in a test tube? By this time our kids were hooked into science and began asking their own questions about the cubes. Some of their questions included: Will they grow if we put them in salt water? What will happen if we put them in Coke? What will happen if we freeze them? They were using the scientific method independently to find their answers.

Our next activity involved cabbage juice, driveway salt, and baking soda. Our question was: What will happen if we mix these three ingredients. We first mixed the salt and the baking soda. Nothing happened. Then, we poured the cabbage juice into the sealed bag. The chemical reaction astonished the kids!

In the meantime, we have been reading a biography on the famous scientist Albert Einstein. Our students are fascinated by the information they are gleaning from this book. They want to read more information on their own about him.

With all of this background knowledge we armed our students with, and their interests, we felt that they were ready to write about what scientists do. They found a science sticker scene from Oriental Trade, and the students created their own lab scene. One student exclaimed, "I never knew that stickers could be so interesting. I thought they were just for little kids!" We explained to the students that the first part of the writing process is brainstorming our ideas, and possibly getting more information. The students read through a PowerPoint about what scientists do, and took notes. Tomorrow morning we are going to talk about the trait of organization, and how we are going to elaborate the details of our notes into an explanatory paragraph.

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Next week we will share our finished product of our writing, and our Albert Einstein project.

Kim and Anne

Fireflies

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Fireflies. Is catching fireflies a special childhood memory? It will be for our students in Lombard. They absolutely love catching fireflies, so we though they would enjoy the poem, "Fireflies," by Paul Fleischmann. This is a poem for two voices. It is not only challenging to read, it is also challenging to understand, which is exactly what we wanted. The purpose of this lesson was for the students to practice using the questioning strategy that good readers use.

We had to first teach the kids how to read this poem with a partner. After they got the hang of reading it with their partner, they then slowed their reading down and began to record the questions that they had. Because it was such a complex text, they had many questions, mainly about the vocabulary. After that, as a whole group, we close read the poem to try to answer our questions. In doing so, we started to figure out why the author used certain words, and why he placed them where he did. We also inferred how the author himself felt about fireflies. He felt like they were artists, and that's why personified them in this poem. Our discussion led to much more than just answering our questions. It was a great, deep lesson. We got the kids thinking about more than the surface level meaning of the poem.

Click here to download this poem.  You can download it even though it will say Woops! There was a problem downloading this document.  That warning comes up because I typed this poem in pages.  The cricket poem is also here.  Anne and I used that poem to model the questioning strategy.

We had planned for that to be all we did with this poem, but Kim came up with a great idea. We decided to have the students write their own review of this poem. We first showed them examples from Spaghetti Book Club of other students' reviews. We noticed that a review would need a summary of the text, our opinion of it, and finally our recommendation. We added the quick, but fun, art project to make some fireflies to go along with our reviews.

Visualization was the next strategy that we worked on. We introduced this strategy with our students using the book, Fireflies, by Judy Brinckloe. We didn't want the students to see the pictures, so we typed the story up. As we read the story, we stopped periodically to discuss our visualizations. Then we showed them the pictures. The students naturally used other strategies while we were reading. They made text to text connections, and asked questions.

Are you now in the mood to catch fireflies?  Hurry up and catch some tonight before it gets too cold.  Just remember to let them go just like the boy in Fireflies did!

Kim and Anne

Exploring the World of Third Grade

Friday, September 9, 2016

Well, it's back to school for us, and we are off and running.  This year we mixed things up and had a brand-new back to school theme that is going to tie into our new social studies unit we planned this summer.  We created a unit on North American explorers, that we are super excited to teach, so we invited our students to come and explore the world of third grade with us.

A few days before school started the students received their Welcome Back letter which was printed on scroll paper.

We found the cutest explorer clip art on TeachersPayTeachers that we used to decorate the door of our classroom.  On a map of the world clip art, we printed the students names.  The door is more adorable than we thought it would be.

When the students came into the classroom on Meet The Teacher day, they found on their desk a plastic safari hat from Oriental Trade along with a squishy globe ball.  Our message to them was, "Put on your hats and let's have fun exploring third grade."  The kids were extremely excited and it was a great way to kick off the year.  Little did we know that our theme closely matched our Madison School theme, which is Madison School...Our Passport To The World.  That was icing on the cake!

We can't wait to share the lessons and ideas from our new explorer unit.  It's short, but sweet!

Have a great weekend.

Kim and Anne

Onomatopoeia Poetry

Tuesday, August 3, 2016

Throughout this past school year, our kids got a kick out of using figurative language. They especially enjoyed hyperbole and onomatopoeia words. When we have taught onomatopoeia words, we have usually used the book, Slop Goes the Soup: A Noisy Warthog Word Book by Pamela Duncan Edwards.

After reading this book, we used it as a  mentor text and had students follow the pattern to write their own sentence with an onomatopoeia word. This year, we upped the ante. We read aloud the book, The Rain Stomper by Addie Boswell. This was a little "meatier" story, and the kids loved it.

Then, we looked for a more challenging writing lesson. We found it on the site called LessonThis. This link was a great resource for the kids. It included an onomatopoeia word list, onomatopoeia books, a topic idea list, and a poem example. So, instead of just writing a sentence, we challenged our students to write a narrative poem using onomatopoeia words. It was hard, but it was the right amount of hard. They worked together and met the challenge head on. In fact, they were so enthusiastic about writing them, they asked if they could write more than one. Here are a few examples of the poems they wrote.

Enjoy the last few weeks of summer. School is right around the corner. We can't wait for it to start! We have been planning new and exciting lessons and  units all summer long and we are eager to try them out in our classrooms! We will share them with you throughout the year.

Kim and Anne

Wump World Environmental Extension Activity

Sunday, July 10, 2016

While reading Wump World, the students were able to relate the pollution and destruction that was happening in Wump World to their own world. To show how companies are trying to keep our environment clean, we did an experiment with cornstarch packing peanuts and regular styrofoam. When both items were placed in water, the students discovered that the packing peanuts were able to dissolve. They made the connection that these packing peanuts are better for our environment because they will dissolve in rain, and not remain on earth for over a million years to decompose like styrofoam does.

The kids had so much fun with the experiment that we decided to use Magic Nuddles, which are essentially the cornstarch packing peanuts, but colored, to create sculptures. All they had to do was use a tiny bit of water, and the Magic Nuudles would stick together. They were very creative in their designs.

From there, we extended the activity even further.  We had been learning about propaganda in language arts, and the techniques that advertisers use with it. To practice some of these techniques, we had the students create their own advertisement for Magic Nuudles. We required them to incorporate some of techniques we had learned, such as bandwagon, cute characters or celebrities, or slogans and catch phrases. We knew this would be an engaging activity for the end of the year, but we were pleasantly surprised at how well they accurately used some of the propaganda techniques. This was the first time we have ever done this activity, and we will for sure do it again in the upcoming school year.

Have a great week!
Kim and Anne

Free Amelia Bedelia Organizers for Common Core

Friday, July 8, 2016

We just posted a freebie on Teachers Pay Teachers. We included the graphic organizers that we used during our Amelia Bedelia unit of study. These will help you implement two standards of the Common Core. You can refer back to an older post from last November to see how we used them in the classroom.

New Product on TpT: Implementing the Common Core with Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

We just finished uploading our latest lesson plan to our Teachers Pay Teachers store.  It is a great bundle of three lesson plans using the folktale Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  We used these lesson plans as part of the process in getting ready for our evaluation this past school year.  It went along with our unit on tales.  The students enjoyed all the activities and were successful with them. 

Soon we will put up our Lon Po Po lesson plans, which mirror the above plans.  Both of these lesson plans focused on character motivation and distinguishing a character's perspective from our own perspective.  These concepts, from the Common Core State Standards, are very challenging for third-grade students and cannot be mastered after one lesson.

Kim and Anne