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Monday, September 23, 2013

Parent Flip Book

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had made a flip book for my parents and students to have as a resource at home. The idea was that they could have all the really important information about sixth grade all in one place. I included homework policies, schedules, each kids individual logins (this took awhile to personalize each book), and contact information for each teacher on our team. I got the books handed out the second week of school or so. I am sure not everyone uses it, but I know it has been helpful for some.

I have seen these flip books a few blogs including this one (Just Reed) ... I love her paper. It is much happier than the options that I had, but I made do.

This is my finished flip book...


The template was by far the hardest part for me, I have added the template to my TpT page if you would like to check it out. It is a word file so you can edit it to make it your own. I have the sections made and labeled for easy layout.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

The Scientific Method

This last week, my students were learning about the scientific method. We have taken some notes in their interactive notebooks and have finished 2 labs so far.

The first set of notes was not all that exciting. It was just some basic definitions and such. For notes on the actual scientific method process we made a "wheel". I was pretty happy with the way it turned out, and the kids got a kick out of the clip art.

These are some pictures of the templates I made and the kid's books as they worked.



The first lab that we did this week was outside. I had the kids take string and mark off a 10 foot x 10 foot square for their group. In their group they had to make a hypothesis about how many four-leaf clovers they would be able to find in their square in 20 minutes. This was really hard, but some groups did find a few.

This was their lab worksheet... (You can purchase this lab at my TpT store)


We also did a magic grow lab on Thursday. For this lab each group picked a magic grow capsule. (you know those sponges that grow in water from a capsule). They had to make a hypothesis about their capsule, then they soaked the capsule, measured the sponge after it grew, and wrote a conclusion.

This coming week, we still have a lab on the computer and then we get to do my favorite part of the unit... Observations and Inferences!!! I absolutely love this part. I love the books we read and the labs we do. I will write a post more on that later. :-)

Interactive Notebooks

I am finally getting around to this post... It has only taken me a few weeks, but I guess that is what happens when school is in. I am using interactive notebooks this year for math and science. I am loving them so far.

For the front inside of the science notebook I had the kids make a picture table of contents. They had to divide the page into 6 sections (one for each unit) and draw and color at least 2 pictures that represent that topic.
This was mine before it was finished. (I still need a few pictures of my kids books)


For the inside of the math notebook I had the kids do a Math About Me page. I found this idea on Pinterest. (The "link" just goes to a picture so I have no idea where it really came from.) For this page they had to come up with six ways to tell something about them using numbers. They had to add pictures and color to this pages as well.


More pages to come...


Monday, September 9, 2013

School is Important Because...

Over the first few days of school I had my students do various versions of the Post-It activity. I made one poster that said School is Important Because... I know that it can be hard to explain to kids why they need school, so I decided to have them tell me why they though school was important. Most of them came up with similar answers,but it was a lot of fun to read.

I was reading bloglovin the other day and came across a post from Middle School Math Moments. She took her "math is important because..." and turned it into a word cloud. You can check out her post here. I loved the idea and decided to make one with my kids statements to hang in the room.

Here is the one I made...I am pretty happy with it :-)


Sunday, September 8, 2013

ChromeBooks

We ordered our Chromebooks yesterday. They should be here Tuesday. I am so excited for them to get here. I made a screensaver for them today so that the screens are all the same and fun!


Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Exciting News!!!

I am very excited tonight. My teaching partner and I applied for 2 grants this summer, and we found out this morning that we got one! It will buy us 4 Chrome Books to use as a math station to help with fluency.

(We took a fluency test and identified the lowest kids in the grade. We will put them in a "exclusive" math club to work on getting their fluency up.)

Monday, September 2, 2013

September Currently Link Up...

It's September....I can't believe it!!! Christmas will be here before we know it. For this month's "currently" I am linking up with Farley at Oh' Boy 4th Grade.


That's really all I got for tonight. I really should get some work finished so I am not behind starting the week off.

(GRRRRRRR... I can't get rid of the white background in the picture and if I make it bigger it covers to much. Sorry folks)