Five For Friday: Young Scholars Edition

Happy Friday Y'all!

Hope everyone has had a great week and start to their summer! The end of the school year and start of the summer was a blur for me. I had been doing so well with actually updating the blog (as opposed to my first year teaching) and then it got away from me!  Hoping to get better throughout the summer which is already half way over for us. :( Can you believe it?

This summer I've been fortunate enough to be working with our new programs summer kickoff, Young Scholars. We all know that traditionally, students who come from culturally and economically diverse backgrounds are generally less represented in our populations of gifted students. Young Scholars aims to find these students, immerse them in different learning opportunities that make them really think outside of the box, and to then hopefully change the statistic. (My words, not theirs). 

In honor of surviving the first two weeks (out of three!) of Young Scholars, i'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

Here goes nothing!

The summer curriculum we are using for Young Scholars focuses on Systems, specifically on Wetlands. We have talked about all sorts of systems from families, to life cycles, to our classroom, and finally to wetlands.  On our first day we decided how we would experiment with our seeds and also made "Gardens in a Glove" to watch as the program progressed.

It's really easy if you haven't done it before, but here is a Link with directions for Garden in a Glove from the Kansas Farm Bureau. There are lots of different ones online, but this is what we used. 

One of the systems that we looked at in depth was the water cycle. We played an awesome water cycle game and made bracelets to track where we went as a "drop of water". 

In the picture  you can see the station signs that I used for each of the stations, the station specific dice, and an example of one of the bracelets that the students created. I paired the students up and sent them to start at the stations. They took the specific color bead for their station  (see the bottom of the sign) and then rolled the dice. The dice told them what station they should go to next. They then grabbed a bead for their new station and rolled again. Each time they rolled the dice, it explained what process they were going through (as a water droplet) and where they needed to go next or if they were staying. Each time they rolled, they got a new bead for their bracelet. 

There are a lot of different places with directions for this activity, but I used the one from the National Park Service. I printed out a blank die template onto pieces of cardstock and wrote it all out. I used a different color of Sharpie to coordinate with the bead used for each station. At the bottom of each station sign, I taped the colors of beads that they would potentially use at that station. 

The kids (even the boys) LOVED this activity and their new bracelets. Even one of my most reluctant boys said, "this looked like a lot of work, but it was actually a ton of fun!". Music to my ears! :)

Another thing that we played around with this week was an app called Haiku Deck. We love it! The students that I am working with are rising fourth and fifth graders and they have been doing so great with this App. They researched Wetlands by looking through some books and then are presenting their information in a Haiku Deck. It's a really simple app to use and their presentations are beautiful! I will be sharing some next week. 

The app gives them different layouts for each slide and has a search tool so they can find images that go with their pictures.

 It also lets them do a bit of customization from deciding on white or black font and then also choosing one of six different fonts for the whole Haiku Deck. This is a huge  relief to teachers who get frustrated with students taking the most time on trying to figure out which font and color they like best out of the 100 different options. 

We also went ahead and created a class mural about everything that we have learned so far! It was great to actually have some time not focusing on tests to be able to let the kids get creative! We have a dinosaur expert in here so our mural is similar to a timeline. We started in the prehistoric times with the dinosaurs that lived in the wetlands and continued to get closer to present day eventually showing our wetland as a Walmart and parking lot. It was great to see the kids all working together on this! 

Last but not least is our field trips next week! Because of the "Arctic Vortex" that was supposed to come last week, we had to reschedule but next week we are taking two awesome field trips!  The first is to a place called Dyke's Marsh in Alexandria, VA. The students will get to have a boating experience, test water quality, learn about boating, and go on a hike. The next field trip will be to Kenilworth Gardens in Washington, D.C. So excited to see what the students get out of these trips! 

I also have to share this super cute bulletin board that is in my friend Lauren's classroom. Love the interactive wheels on the board! 

What have you all been up to this summer? Any one else doing summer school and trying to find ways to make it fun?