Gotta Love the Impromptu Projects!

Our current science unit is on Stars and Constellations. I love studying the stars! After we finished reading a lesson today I decided that it would be fun for my students to create posters about what we have learned so far. It was random, but I love what I see coming from these students. They are following a check list and working well as groups. It is interesting to see the leaders come out, leaders clashing with each other, compromising, creativity, silliness, and art. All of these things are important in the learning process! I can't to share pictures of this project!

Here is the checklist I gave to them. 

• Title
• Information
• Correct Spelling
• Cursive
• Easy to read/Neat
• Names of people in the group
• Pictures
• Color
• Creative
• Everyone participates
• Work well as a group

Cursive

I always forget how stressful cursive is in January.
I teach cursive in the first half of the year and in the second half we use cursive in every subject.
It never fails that first time I ask them to do an entire assignment in cursive there are several students who panic. I try to remind them that it will take us longer, but there are some that I just can't convince. A handful of them are whining about it, one is crying, and the rest are frustrated over it taking a longer time. Good grief! I guess I'm just torturing them.
Muah ha ha ha! (yes, that is my sinister laugh)

Phases of the Moon

I found this great idea on Pinterest! (I love finding things on there!)

The students used Oreo Cookies to model the phases of the moon. 

They had a blast and were excited to munch on a few when they were done! 

I had them working in pairs because I wasn't sure if I would have enough cookies. I find that when I randomly pair students together it works the best. They all got right to work. It was a huge success!

Keep Those Lesson Plans!

I'm only a beginning teacher, but I've gotten some great advice from my peers this year. They all tell me to keep my lesson plans. This may seem logical to you, but I'm not just saying to keep your lesson plan book. It is helpful to be able to look back at your lesson plan book for sure. But I'm thinking about it in a more electronic form.
At my school we have to post our lesson plans, including the objectives, onto the program RenWeb. This how parents and administration can see what we are doing in our classrooms (other than coming into the classroom of course). Before I post them on this program I type them all on a Word document. That way I have them all in one place to look at next year when I'm planning out my lessons. Some of them will change slightly since I am learning what works and what doesn't, but at least I won't have to rethink every single lesson.

So...
KEEP YOUR LESSON PLANS!!

New Obsession

Sometimes kids are so funny. It cracks me up what I find in their desks. I don't look through their desks very often, if at all, but I asked them to clean them out on Friday due to a school preview day coming up. A few of my students didn't really understand the task apparently. What makes me laugh is the amount of children who have accumulated a lovely rock collection in their desks. No wonder they can't fit anything else in them (!) they are full of rocks! 

A handful of my students have decided to spend their recess time crushing rocks out on the playground in order to find crystals. This wouldn't be a problem except that the school secretary has asked that they stop due to the amount of students coming in bleeding from cutting themselves while breaking the rocks apart. Well I guess they are back at it again. So funny.

 

Do you remember playing with random things in your desk growing up?

Cereal Box Book Report

This is my first year teaching 3rd grade. And I completely love it. One of the online resources I've used is Beth Newingham's website. She is a very talented teacher. One thing I found on her site was the Cereal Box Book Report. Her site gives all the information you need to put it together.
This is such a fun book report. My students were really excited to do it when I explained what they would be doing. I asked each student to choose a realistic fiction book that was at least 100 pages long. This proved to be a little tricky for some of them. I might rethink that for next year. They had about 3 weeks to finish the project.
I was so pleased to see how creative my students were in doing this project. They named their own cereal, decorated the front of the box, created fun puzzles on the back of the box, wrote a summary of the book, and put a prize in the box. It was so fun to go through them.

Can you figure out what books these cereals are based on?

Leap Day!

I showed this to my class this morning 

(I know...I'm a day late, but I just discovered it last night!)

It is a great explanation about why we have an extra day every 4 years.