All About Animals

This week we finished up our All About Animals unit of study.  We spent about 6 weeks researching and writing about animals.  I love this unit of study each year because it engages kids while covering nonfiction reading, writing, and science standards.  The end result is a chapter book full of nonfiction text features showcasing their learning.

I give my students a choice between 8 different animals to learn about: snakes, elephants, dolphins, sharks, penguins, butterflies, orangutans, and bears.  I have chosen these animals strategically.  They cover a variety of animal groups (reptiles, mammals, insects, etc.) and habitats (ocean, dessert, polar, etc.).  For my lessons I use frogs (amphibians) as my animal for research together as a class.

A benefit to using just these 8 animals to choose from is that I have collected lots of books to be used for research.  Also, we visit the Indianapolis Zoo as a culmination of our learning and I know all of these animals can be found there, which is very exciting for the kids and extends their learning.

Okay, enough about animal selection... on to the writing!

One of the areas I hit hard during this unit is nonfiction text features.  Here is just one student's book (not all of it... just a taste)…

Front Cover

Title Page

Dedication Page

Table of Contents

Chapter with Headings and Sub-Headings

Diagram

Glossary

(We bolded words throughout the book and then included those words in a glossary.)

Meet the Author

Back Cover

(Note:  This kid added the reading level info all on his own.  Hahaha!)

These books will be on display this spring for an open house with parents.  My students are very excited to show off all their hard work.  Hope you enjoyed taking a peek into our All About Animals unit of study!

Pumpkin STEM

It IS still pumpkin season, right?  You wouldn't know by all the Christmas décor already in stores.  As for me, I'm going to savor the beauty of fall until Thanksgiving!

These are photos of our Pumpkin STEM Challenge.  I have an investigation station set up in my room.  A place where students can investigate and manipulate and learn.  A couple of weeks ago, I gave my students a STEM challenge to build a gate that can hold five little pumpkins.  The "Five Little Pumpkins" was our poem for the week to go along with this.

The only supplies given were connecting cubes and popsicle sticks.  The challenge was to be able to get all five pumpkins onto your structure.

The first group was able to build a "gate" to hold 2 pumpkins.  They posted this on our Seesaw Class feed for other students to see what they did, comment, and think about what they would do to improve upon the design.  Could they build one to fit all 5 pumpkins?

The next group built this structure, posted it on Seesaw, and other students could comment and view.  These students didn't really build a structure, rather they just laid the materials on the table and stacked pumpkins on top of it...  well, only 4 pumpkins would fit.  Again, I asked the students how we could take what the first two groups did and improve.

The next group built their structure up and got those pumpkins raised; however the feedback they received after posting their work to Seesaw was that the structures were individual, not connected.  And, once again, not all 5 pumpkins were on it.

The last group built this structure and were able to get all 5 pumpkins onto the gate.  We all agreed this was the most successful design.

This was a great learning experience and lots of fun for the kids.  Critical thinking, constructive criticism, receiving feedback, were all skills we learned from this challenge.

It's not too late... it's still officially fall and pumpkin season!  Get your Pumpkin STEM Challenge on!

Cool Investigation Station: Update Week 1

Our first week with our "Cool Investigation Station" was a success and a hit with my students!  As predicted, they rushed over to this station as soon as they walked in the room and wanted to know what we are going to be doing.  I loved that!

This week, I really just wanted my students to begin thinking about solids and liquids and their properties.  The first couple of days, I let the students just explore the books and work with the solids & liquids sort I put out for them.  Students sorted items into solids or liquids.  They worked together with other kids on this.  (Read previous post about how I use my investigation station as a Daily 5 choice here.)

After sorting, students wrote one post-it note to tell me why they thought an item was a solid or a liquid.  Before allowing them to work here independently, I had the students gather around on the first day and I taught them what was at the station and how they could use the materials.  I asked them to be specific when explaining why an item was either solid or liquid.

Their thinking always amazes me!  I wish I had taken a photo of my favorite response (I was in a hurry to leave for the day), which said "School glue is a liquid because it is sticky".  That is genius.  Let that sink in for a moment.  We could do a whole study just on that.  #kidsareamazing.

Oh!  We also came up with two questions for inquiry.  I hung these up hovering over our investigation station so they are there to remind the kids their goal.
1.  Why does snow sometimes melt when the sun is out and when it's cloudy?  Why does the snow NOT melt sometimes when it's sunny?

2.  During Winter Break it rained... a lot!  There was lots of flooding.  Why didn't it snow?  It was December, doesn't it usually snow during the holidays?

I will tell you that these are questions that I came up with.  I used to think that true inquiry HAD to be wholly directed by student questions and I was a "doing it wrong" if I put in my 2 cents.  Well, after studying more on inquiry based learning and PBL (project based learning), I have discovered that we, as teachers, CAN drive the questions.  Students will of course have their own questions, too, and they can absolutely pursue those as well; however, it's important that the work we are doing is focused on learning the standards.  In this case, we are focusing on our science standards around solids & liquids and math standards around temperature.  So, the teacher drives the questions, but makes sure there is voice and choice for the students. 

As with any PBL project, it begins with a problem.  So, I played this up big time that there were 2 questions I was wondering about and that I needed their help to figure it out.  They are always ALL OVER helping me figure out a problem.  Keeping with giving students voice and choice, the students chose which question they want to research.  They will drive the research and decide how they want to present it to the class.  They chose partners to work with, or whether they wanted to work solo (no one did).

So, we are off and running on our PBL around solids, liquids, and snow/ice/rain!

Up next week:  We will learn more about solids & liquids through mini lessons and "cool" science experiments.  We'll also be visiting the computer lab to do some research with our partners.  And, of course, I'm working on getting new things to explore into the investigation station.

I'll post more next week as we progress!  If you are reading this, thank you so much for coming along for the ride!  Please follow my blog and FB page for updates.

Thank you so much, and have a wonderful weekend!

 

A Cool Investigation Station

My students are going to think this is the "coolest" thing ever!!

Today was our first day back from winter break, but it was a teacher work day.  Our students come back tomorrow.

One of the things I prepped today was an investigation station.  I have an area set aside in my classroom where students can do a little inquiry based learning.  This week, we will kick off some project based learning around solids and liquids.  I decided this year to focus primarily on snow, ice, rain, etc. while investigating solids and liquids.  I'll post more about this PBL unit as we progress through it.

 

For now, this investigation station will allow students to explore books this week.  We will be doing some research once we come up with our inquiry questions about snow.  I also plan to put some items to investigate here as we progress. 

To entice them over to this station, I used chart paper to create some icicles on the shelf.  They are going to notice it straight away as soon as they enter the room - kids notice everything, don't they?  I know my kids will line up to choose this station to work at.


In my room, investigation station is one of my Daily 5 choices.  I usually put something there to explore having to do with concepts we're working on.  This has really worked for me in my classroom because students can explore independently while others are reading, doing word work, etc.  I allow 4-6 students at this station at one time.  And, I love to listen in on their conversations as they explore.


In addition to the books you see on the shelf, I have some items in a basket for them to sort into solids or liquids.  Gonna put some more items in there tomorrow...






They will use post-it notes to explain their thinking about why an item is a solid or liquid.

All of this is just for my students to explore and to get their feet "wet" (sorry for the cheesy puns) before we jump in to our PBL project later this week.  Can't wait to see where it leads us!