Matter week has been amazing! Before this unit began, Mr. Schreurs and I created a book creator book with all of the information the students would need. It included vocabulary, poetry, and outlines of experiments. Throughout the week, the students have been both referring to their books and adding to them. For example, today they were doing an ice cube melting experiment. They recorded their plan for melting the ice cube the quickest. Then, one person in the group was using the timer to time the experiment and another person was taking videos and pictures. The third person was following the steps of their plan. After the ice cube melted, the students shared their videos and pictures and were able to record their reflections of how they felt their plan went and what they might do differently next time. They had many opportunities for these types of reflections throughout the week. When the week is over, they will have a really complete, interactive book of everything they learned about matter. I would definitely like to organize more units like this in the future.
I've been working with a small group on a digital discussion board. We've been using the website Padlet. I've been reading a book aloud to these students and every few pages, I have the students type their questions and answer any of the others that they think they can from the group. The students were so motivated to work on their padlet that they asked for extra time to work on it after their morning routine was done. The students were discussing and typing at the same time. It was fun to see how excited they were to add ideas to the board. Below is the padlet they are working on for the book Fly Away Home. Last year I ordered a subscription to Scholastic's Weekly Reader magazine for each child so that we would have them all of this year. The magazines came with a cool online feature that we've been using lately. There is a Scholastic magazine app that allows us to read our magazines on the ipads. It also has cool enhancements, like videos, that show more details than just reading the paper copy of the magazine. The past couple weeks we've used this app to learn more about Chinese New Year and Dr. Seuss for World Read Aloud Week. I can't wait to see what the next month's current events will be! |
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May 2015
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