Back Again - Open House Projects

I am sitting home alone and extremely bored, so I decided to finally get caught up with my blogging. I have so many pictures from this year, and have just been terrible about getting them on here.

Last night was Open House at my school, so I thought I'd give a peek into some of the projects we have accomplished this year.

Here is how everything looked right before the doors opened:

As we are getting closer to the end of the year, some of my students want to be a bit chattier, so I have transitioned from my regular group seating, to this paired stadium seating. I really like it because it gives students an easier view of the front of the classroom and less distractions, but I am also able to continue incorporating lots of pair-shares and group work. I have my students trained to move their desks back into a group arrangement in under 20 seconds, so we do that for times where I have larger group work planned.

Anyways, I thought I would show you some of the projects on display a bit more close up.

This is an Element project that I created this year, and that I really love. After learning all about elements, students were assigned an element from the periodic table based on their class number. They then researched their element, and created these standing displays based on their research. Each child became an expert on their element and then presented it to the class. The rest of the class took notes, and were therefore able to learn about many other elements as well.

This is a "Who am I?" descriptive writing paragraph that my students made. This is another craft that I created. The students wrote their paragraph on the first page of the magnifying glass, and then drew a picture of what they were describing on the second page. We have been really focusing on nonfiction writing and descriptive writing, and this was a fun cumulating craft/writing assignment.

Whenever possible, I like to get my students to create while they are learning, even if that simply means coloring and labeling. When they create for themselves, I find that their much more likely to retain the information. In Science, one of our units was on the lithosphere, and one of the first things we learned about was the layers of the Earth. This simple paperplate labeling activity was a big hit as a part of that lesson. The color is based on the heat of the layers, not what they actually look like, obviously :-).

On their desks, students also had their persuasive essays for their parents to read. Students could either argue for or against our uniform policy. I structure our persuasive essays fairly heavily, and this causes my students to be able to write quite sophisticated essays. This unit takes a long time, both for my students and for me. Individually writing feedback for both the rough and final drafts takes a looooong time, but I love to do it, because the improvement is so great to see.

 This is pretty self-explanatory. Most teachers end up doing an activity like this when introducing fractions. What can I say? It's a great one! It really helps students get the concept of fractions conceptually, and again, they are able to create.

Another Science unit we have done this year is on the troposphere. After students learned about the four main types of clouds (stratus, cirrus, cumulus, and nimbus), they created their own Cloud books. After they wrote a paragraph on each cloud, they made paper representations of the clouds.

One fun thing our cloud unit has brought to my classroom, is that we now daily decide what kind of clouds are in our sky in the morning. It has become a permanent part of our morning routine, and students consistently remember to check the sky prior to coming into the classroom. This just takes one minute, and keeps this vocabulary and understanding fresh in their minds. I've actually been super impressed with how their vocabulary has grown by doing this. They have even started to use the complex prefixes scientists use in order to differentiate different clouds. Just today, one student said this "I think that we have cirrostratus clouds today, because they are foggy and gray just like stratus clouds and cover the sky, but they look like they are super high up, and stratus clouds are usually low."

Before teaching this unit, I didn't even really know the prefixes, and now they are using them better than me!

Well, that's it for now. Hopefully I don't wait too long in between now and the next post. I have so many more things to share!

"Math Around the Room" and other Active Classroom Activities.

Last year, I had some very fidgety learners. Their own active minds would get in the way of their learning, and especially in the way of their practicing. They needed to move!

Because of this, I started using Math Around the Room more and more. It helped my active minds to focus as they got to move around while doing work without being disruptive. And I also discovered that it was great for my other students as well. This year, I don't have as many fidgeters, but I still am using this kind of activity all the time. It just breaks up the day more, and refreshes all students. They all enjoy it, and are able to work on the assigned problems very quietly and with no classroom management problems.

What is Math Around The Room?
It is simple:
1) Take the worksheet problems you want your students to work on.
2) Cut them up
3) Post them in various places around the room (on chairs, by the library, on the counter, by the backpacks etc.)
4) Students walk around the room with a clipboard and recording sheet, moving around and solving the problems.
In my class, this may only be done silently. If students are having a hard time and are getting distracted by their peers, they have to work by their desk while everyone else gets to cycle the room. Because they really enjoy Math Around the Room, this is all the reinforcement they need, and they work quietly on their activity.

This can be used for any subject and most activities. I tend to use it most for Math, for the simple reason that we need to practice math skills in the form of a worksheet more often than other subjects.

Here are some pictures of my students doing this:

In these three pictures, we were doing Math Around the Room for ordering big numbers. This is a free product that can be found on tpt. I posted 4 pencils, 4 apples, 4 markers etc. around the room. Students had to find all of them, and then put them in order, either from least to greatest or greatest to least. A lot of my students were already great at ordering numbers, but some needed extra support. This activity allowed me to work with a few students one on one, while the rest of the class was engaged and thinking, as opposed to bored at doing something they already knew how to do.

Because I liked this activity so much, I decided to create my own for math facts, since such a product did not exist. It is up for purchase at my store, and can be found here.

Again, students really enjoyed this activity and were able to quietly practice their math facts, while I had the opportunity to work with a few students who were struggling (particularly with their division facts).

"________ Around the Room" is definitely something I would recommend for your classroom. It is life-saving for our friends with ADHD, but fun and useful for the entire class as well. You should try it out!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Diving-into-Math-Facts-Math-Around-the-Room-Multiplication-and-Division-1430295

Back Again

So, clearly I have been terrible about blogging. I keep wanting to, and then the task of restarting up again feels so overwhelming that I don't.

I finally decided enough is enough, so here I go. No promises on being able to keep it up.

Things that have happened since the last time I posted...back in March (yikes!)

1. I started my second year of teaching. I have a great group of 4th graders. They are a very quiet group compared to last year's class. I had to actually teach them how to pair-share, which was something last year's class picked up like a fish picks up swimming. Interestingly, my boy-girl ratio is also very skewed. I only have 5 boys! FIVE! The rest are all girls! Anyways, they are awesome. I am really enjoying them so far.

And I am still loving teaching every single day. It is definitely the profession for me! I just love coming up with engaging lessons that the kids also love.

2. I opened up a Teacher Pay Teacher store! It can be found here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Explorations-Of-A-4th-Grade-Teacher
It is not a big store yet (only 17 items) and I am not making a ton of money. Still, I am selling things, which feels pretty great. I am making enough that I can buy what I need from TPT basically for free. So my tpt addiction is currently paying for itself, but I don't really have extra spending money. Surprisingly, it is my bible products that are selling the most so far.

Anyways, I will probably link to some of my products as I blog about what we are doing in the classroom. Joining TPT has definitely made me a better teacher. I am spending time making things for my classroom and more engaging lessons, that I might not have made otherwise.

Ok, well this is just a check-in, so that is all for now. Hopefully I will actually keep the blog up this time :-)

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.