Five for Friday... I mean Saturday :)

Well, Friday got away from me, but I didn't want to miss linking  up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for a Five for Saturday. 

First of all, yesterday was the last day of Young Scholars. What an amazing experience for the kids and for us! There will be more to come about this amazing program and how I believe it will positively affect our students. This week we got to go on a field trip to Dyke's Marsh in Alexandria. The kids got go out in paddle boats. So many of them have never been on a boat before. They also got to see a real wetland. 

On Thursday, we went to Kenilworth Gardens in Washington, D.C. Who would have thought this gem was located right inside of the city?

It was absolutely beautiful! The pictures from my phone just don't do it justice. 

My favorite picture of the day is the one that I snapped of one of my kids. I love his safari hat and how he brought his sketch pad with him on the trip so that he could sketch everything that he was seeing! 

Yesterday was our very last day of Young Scholars. I mentioned last week that the students created presentations with Haiku Deck. Yesterday they got to share them with the class. They all created one on Wetlands, but my resident dino expert made his on prehistoric wetlands. I'm so proud of how they turned out!

Fourth, today is my birthday! I'm happy to say that my apartment is full of my best friends and that I am ringing in 25 with a bang! I'm so blessed to have so many wonderful people in my life. 

Especially this girl who I have been blessed to spend 12 birthdays with!

Finally, I'm excited to be participating in our Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project home grown workshop this week. I was our school's writing chairperson last year and was able to go to monthly workshops for TCRWP, it's going to be four days full of writing workshop. I'm so incredibly excited! 

How is the end of your summer turning out? Doing any exciting professional development? 

Wordless Wednesdays: Haiku Deck

This summer has been off to a crazy start! More to come about this in a post later this week. For now, I'm linking up with Sugar and Spice for Wordless Wednesdays:

Today we are using an app called Haiku Deck in class! More to come about this later...

What technology have you found to incorporate into your classrooms?

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?

Mathematical Monday: Blowing Bubbles to Learn About Circles

Today I am linking up with I Heart Recess  for Mathematical Monday to share one of my most favorite math activities that we do all year long! I have done this activity the past two years and I... my kids love it. My math coach told me about it last year and I now have brought it to my new school and done it with my TAG students and some of the fifth graders. It is so much fun!

 

Educators like to have pi day and to use food to study circles. I love pi day too, but many schools are changing to where you can no longer give students food. Because of this, this is a great alternate or additional activity to give your students some time to have fun with circles on a hands on way. Not only do they have a blast, but boy your desks will never be cleaner!

Materials Needed: liquid hand soap, straw for each student, measuring tapes (the ones that tailors use), a cup or measuring cup, and cleared off desks. 

I make up a bucket of the soapy solution (just some liquid soap and water (Dawn works well)) and go ahead and pour some (a small cup or measuring cup works well) on an area where all students can see so that I can model the activity. I have a straw and put it down in the middle of some suds(it is important that you water is very sudsy). You want to make sure that you are holding the straw straight up and down. Then, you should blow lightly and a large bubble will appear on the desk. Once the bubble pops, show students how to measure the diameter and how you expect them to record it. 

Once your expectations are set and students are aware of how to do it, set them off! Put a scoop of the bubble solution on each desk. They will want to spread it around and then go ahead and start trying to blow bubbles. 

This is one of my fifth graders blowing his bubble, they get really big!

Another excellent bubble blown!

 This student  is measuring her diameter, you can see the ring of suds that they measure really well int this picture!

Important Things to Remember:

1. Make sure the straw is straight up and down when you try to blow.

2. Make sure you are sticking your straw into some suds.

3. If you already have a bubble partially  blown and want to make it bigger, put the straw straight up and down on the desk and drag it over to the edge of the bubble. Once it is touching, you can start blowing to make it larger. 

4. Make sure you keep track of what side of the straw has been touching the desk and what side you have been blowing with. Nobody wants to taste the soap! 

5. If there are not many suds on the desk, they can use their hands to scoop all of the mixture back to the middle of the desk.

6. A 5 minute practice bubble blowing session (without measuring the diameter each time) is always fun a good way to make sure students are ready to go. 

I have done this activity with two fifth grade classes. Both times it has been very successful, but there are always a few students that say they can not get a bubble. For these students, I demonstrate on their desk and then take a scoop of just suds from the top of the mixture to put onto their desk. They normally get it right afterwards. It will be a hectic lesson for you, your job will be to scoop more sud mixture onto their desks and they will always be asking for it. The hard work pays off though, with an excellent lesson and a ton of fun!  After a certain amount of time (I generally give them 5 minutes of practice and 10 minutes of blow and record time), have the students clean up. I then have them do the actual calculations with the circumference formula to find the circumference of the their bubble circles. Largest circumference gets a prize! 

I definitely recommend doing this activity with your students if you study the area or circumference of circles. It's a ton of fun. Just make sure you practice a bit with the bubble mixture before the lesson.

Happy Teaching Y'all!