Dissecting Squid - 4th Grade

One really fun thing we did in Science was a squid dissection lab. Turns out that you can pay people to come into your classroom to do this with your class (another cool thing I learned from my 4th grade team). Basically, it is a field trip inside of the classroom, where the field comes to you! This was a very cool project that students loved, and I had to do next to nothing, besides walk around and take some pictures!

This took about an hour and a half. We watched a video and learned about squid, dissected squid, diagramed squid, and finally ATE squid. That's right, we salvaged some clean parts from the squid we had dissected, fried them up, and ate them with a little garlic salt. And they tasted good too. Again, I was super glad I wasn't in charge here, I never would have had the guts to give kids calamari to eat.

Without further ado, what you have been waiting for, the pictures:

The squid prior to dissection. Kinda cute actually.

And starting to dissect!

Once students had completely dissected their squid, they got to take out the ink sack and write with it. Here is one of my students writing his name!

6 Characteristics of Life - Science

For this post, I am going to do some free advertisement for "A House Called Home" on Teachers Pay Teachers. This product was my very first purchase on tpt because I just couldn't resist getting it for my Science unit. I loved it, and will definitely continue doing this project every year.

As I prepared my lessons on the 6 characteristic of life, I was despairing at how boring the whole unit was. So I did some digging online and found the perfect (and fun) application. My kids loved it and they definitely deepened their understanding in ways they wouldn't have without this project. "My Living Invention" has students inventing their own creature and defending how their creature has each of the 6 characteristics of life.

The beauty of the project is that it takes very little time. I had 6 lessons, one for each of the characteristics. At the end of each lesson, students filled out just the box pertaining to that characteristic, which took all of 10 minutes. Then, at the end of the unit, we threw everything together onto a poster board. Students were super invested and very avidly paying attention to the lessons in order to better defend their creature. They loved it!

Here are all of my student's finished projects on the wall.

As you can see, students were super creative. We had many flighted animals, some animal-combos, and some more unique creatures such as flesh-eating plants. 

Here is a close-up of one of the posters. 

One thing I absolutely loved about this project is how deeply students had to think about the concepts. Creation is the highest order of Bloom's taxonomy, and students really had to understand each concept in order to defend their creature well. It also made assessment really really easy. It was so easy to see any misconceptions students held, based on what they wrote, and I was able to correct some of their thinking after grading these projects. The difference between adapts and responds was by far the most difficult for my students.

California Topographical Maps - 4th Grade

One of the first major Social Studies projects we did back in the Fall was make topographical maps of California, using homemade salt dough. The class learned about the different California regions and major landmarks as we made the maps together. This was a pretty extensive project. We spent an entire hour for an entire week working on these. I had two parent volunteers per day. I could have done it without them I suppose (so don't fret if you would like to do this project but don't usually get a lot of parent help), but boy did it make things easier to have parents helping out!

Here is a picture story of the events:

 Here is the Before. The key is to have students bring their own salt dough. It is a very easy recipe, and it saves a whole lot of time. We needed a lot of salt dough, so with each child bringing one batch, we were guaranteed to have enough. I made two extra batches for those students who forgot to bring dough or whose dough was too runny.

This is the progress after the second day. We did the Central Valley and mountain ranges on the first day, and then finished the coast and desert on the second day. Basically the way it works is that we have a map of California attached to a piece of cardboard. We then pressed the salt dough in small pieces directly onto the paper.

I tried as hard as possible to get students to be as accurate topographically as possible. We didn't include all mountain peaks of course, but we did include the top three Whitney, Shasta, Lassen and students were supposed to ensure that Whitney was the tallest peak on their map.

Here is a close-up of a topographical map. One big thing I graded for was that the Sierras were twice the size of the Coastal Ranges. This student did a good job of that, as well as placing his mountain peaks in the correct spot.

On the third and fourth day, we painted in the same order as we built: Central Valley first, then mountains, followed by the coast and desert. The reason we split it up is because you really want the salt dough to be completely dry. Otherwise it still shrinks and moves.

We painted the four regions in four different colors. All of them are pretty realistic with the exception of the coast. The different colors really help the students learn the different regions. After this activity, all of my students knew them and they still correctly refer to them months later.

Finally, on the last day, we labeled everything. This is the finished product. As you can see, there are some cracks in the painting because the dough was not completely dry. For next year, I think I am going to do the map building on Thursday/Friday and then the painting/labeling on Monday through Wednesday in order to give the dough more time to dry.


This project is what made me fall in love with teacher collaboration. As a first year teacher, I would have never attempted this project on my own because it seemed way too daunting. But my coworker (the other 4th grade teacher) has done this project for years, and she walked me through the process. And I loved it! Definitely doing it again next year and for many years to come. It is such a fun project and the students get so much out of it! It is also surprisingly easy.

Long Time No Blog

So clearly the blogging thing never happened! After I stopped blogging after the first few weeks of school, I still continued to take pictures. I didn't have the motivation to blog after teaching, so I was going to catch up during Thanksgiving break. Well, that didn't happen, so then I was going to catch up during winter break. That didn't happen either.

Now I am a few weeks away from Spring break (our break is sooo late this year) and I just so happen to be bored. So here I am, several months later, planning on sharing a few fun projects we have done this year.

Overall, my first year of teaching is going really really well. It honestly is not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I don't really feel like a new teacher. I just feel like I am in the groove of things at this point.