Five For Friday - Fun Graph App and More

I've done every Five for Friday in 2016!  I'm on a roll!

Thanks Kacey at Doodle Bugs for the fun weekly linky!

I've been asked to buy Girl Scout cookies every day this week.

Yep, my freezer will be full of boxes come March.

On Wednesday a girl asked if I wanted to buy some, and of course I said yes.

I was surprised when she went to her backpack and got her phone.

She told me she's doing all her orders on the app.

She walked me through the app order like a pro.

Time they are a changin.....

We got a surprise 2-hour delay on Tuesday.

I was already up and showered, and saw the announcement on a friend's Facebook post.

The trees in my backyard looked beautiful covered in the heavy snow.

It was a perfect day to pull this out.

These snowmen turn out so cute!

It's in my TpT store for only $2.00.

If you've followed my other posts, you know that we've been working on a unit on Simple Machines.

To complete the unit, we took a field trip to our local history museum which had an exhibit on bikes.

Did you know that Trek bikes are made here in WI?

We were lucky to get a local celebrity, Professor Gizmo, as our guide.

He pulled in lots of connections to Simple Machines as he told about the history of biking in our state.

The kids were able to ride stationary bikes on virtual bike paths!

We've been working on graphs in math.

I found an iPad app that was a perfect match for the unit.

It's called "Teaching Graphs", and the cost is $2.99.

It's worth the money, IMHO.

There are games, and students can also create their own graphs.

Have you heard about Fabletics?

It's a company that sells c-u-u-u-t-e workout clothes, and you get your first outfit for $25!

I got an outfit last week, and I paid $30 because I chose a long-sleeve shirt over a tank.

There is no charge for shipping!

The yoga pants are so comfy I ended up wearing them the night I got the package.

You can sign up for a monthly outfit suggestion emailed to you, however 

nothing gets delivered to you unless you order it. 

I think this is better than Stitch Fix because you don't have to hassle with 

sending items back that you don't like.

You can decline the online outfit suggestion each month.

Quite honestly I signed up just to get the $25 outfit, and will see what the monthly offers are like.

If you want to get your own $25 outfit, check out the site here.

Thanks for stopping by this week!

Five For Friday - Snow Science Experiment and More

Hi Friends!

Here is this week's update.

We are wrapping up our unit on Simple Machines, and one of the assessments I used was on Google Doc.

I created a Google doc that included a paragraph (not shown) that the students had to edit for missing periods. Then they had to use that paragraph as a model to write a new paragraph about the wedge (an axe) shown in the picture.  I shared the document with the students through Drive, and they made a copy, worked on the paragraphs, and then saved to their Drive.

I also asked them to share it back with me.

Google Drive provides an easy way to view completed work!  No papers to mess with!

I do a weekly poem, and this one was about the season of Winter.

We rewrote the poem, choosing a new topic.

Some students wrote about sports, others chose books, and this girl wrote about friends!

Our week started out with sub zero temperatures.

Here's my love bug trying to stay warm cuddled in a blanket!

As I write this I am avoiding writing report cards.

They are due Monday.

Thanks to Ryan for making the process a bit more tolerable.

Are you one of those people getting pummeled with snow this weekend?

Here's something fun to do with all that snow when you return to school.

This results collected on this tally chart are probably no surprise to those that work with young students.

 After viewing the competed tally chart, my students were instructed to go outside and fill a 100 mL beaker with snow from anywhere on the school grounds.

They worked in groups of three on this, and some wanted to find the (what they thought to be)
cleanest snow on the property.

 We then placed the snow on a coffee filter that sat atop a screen over a plastic container.

The papers noted group members' names and where they found their snow.

 After letting the snow melt overnight, the students came back to observe the remains on their coffee filters

YUCK!

Students recorded observations on a tri-fold sheet.

This fun activity, which leads to lots of great discussion, can be found in my TpT store for only $2.00.

Head on over to Doodle Bugs Teaching for more Five For Friday updates!

Thanks for stopping by my blog!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Five For Friday - A Way to Make Math Worksheets Fun

I'm back for another week of Five For Friday.  Thanks to Kacey at Doodle Bugs for hosting!

Our district has adopted the Math Expression Common Core series.

If you use this program you know that it includes MANY pages of story problems

 to encourage reflection of the concepts. 

This week we finished a unit section on elapsed time, and had worked on strategies for computing starting times, ending times, how much time, etc...

Too make these story problem worksheets a bit more interactive, I decided to make timeline drawings for the problems, and post them around the room. 

Students had already practiced making these timeline drawings themselves in previous lessons.

The students worked with a partner to match the problem on the worksheet with a drawing posted somewhere in the room.

Each partner group started with a different problem on the worksheet to avoid all crowding around one timeline.

The directions were:

1. Read the problem, circling important information.

2. Look around the room for a timeline that matches the information you circled, as well as the text in the story problem.

3. When the matching timeline was found, students wrote the answer to the problem, as well as the corresponding letter of the timeline picture.  

You can see in the photo above, that it was labeled as timeline A.

4. Once all partner groups were finished, we came back together as a class and compared answers.

Students discussed their reasoning in matching problems to timelines.

Many students said they loved doing our math work in this way.

I have done it before with other kinds of story problem sheets.

Measurement is the theme for this current math unit, and the first part of the unit dealt with measuring weight.

I asked students to donate cans, and each day we weighed them on a simple scale.

Before weighing them we estimated if they were less than a pound, equal to a pound, or more than a pound.

We did begin to read the info on the labels to help us.

Now, we will donate all the cans to our local food pantry.

We do this project every year!

We are finishing up a unit on Simple Machines.

See my previous post for more on that.

We read books about force, and student pairs looked for sentences that included the word force.

They wrote the sentences on sticky notes, and sorted them on this anchor chart.

I rewrote the sentences so they were easier to see.

Did you know the Green Bay Packers are playing in a big game this weekend?

We wrote letters to our favorite team to cheer them on!

Go Pack GO!

We used these great books to learn about Martin Luther King.

I love the illustrations in this book!

A small group worked on the reading and related pyramid project each day this week during our station time.

This project can be found in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, and includes suggestions for doing projects about not only Martin Luther King, but other famous Black Americans!

 Click here to view the product.

Hope you had a great week!

Five for Friday - Close Reading Fun!

Thanks to Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for hosting this fun week-in-review linky!

I introduced Close Reading this week in small groups while we read an article in a Time For Kids magazine.

We did a cold read first, then I brought out the glasses, an annotation guide, and permanent markers.

I got the glasses at my eye doctor's office.  I just asked if they had any child-sized frames that they were willing to give up, and they gave me about 10 pairs for free.

After the initial excitement of wearing the glasses, the students reread the article adding marks from our school district's suggested annotation guide. 

We did a third read looking for pronouns, as that connected with our 

spelling and grammar topic of the week.

Thanks to Angela from Hippo Hooray for Second Grade on her blog post about establishing pairs for group work.  I have always used things like Compass Buddies, etc; but liked the idea of assigning each student a "buddy identity".  So all week these buddies sat next to each other when we worked on the carpet.

Maybe the Berry Blue buddy would have to share ideas first, 

and the next day the Silver buddy would have to share first.

Of course you may have realized that Berry Blue and Silver are our school colors!

We are learning about Simple Machines in Science.

I've been searching online for fun, doable explorations for this unit.

I was thrilled to find a suggestion to use the black section for binder clips 

for the fulcrum piece on these levers!

Here is one the activities the Berry Blue and Silver buddies worked on together.

We were working on pronouns this week, and students had to sort them into 

first person, second person, or third person point of view.

To review, they used a spinner with three sections. Depending on the number that was spun, the partner gave  a pronoun from the matching list of point of view words to spell.

This is Teresa Halbach.

Teresa is a lovely young woman who was horrifically murdered about 45 miles away

 from the city in which I live.

I did not know her, but I have close friends who knew her, and her family, well.

Its been said that she was photographer who could get babies to smile when no one else could.

She was a line therapist for autistic children.

She was the coach of her middle school-aged sisters' volleyball team at a nearby Catholic School.

She could have been your sister, your daughter, your niece, your friend.

Her family declined to be a part of the movie that was recently released on Netflix, because they didn't want 

their tragedy to become a source of entertainment.

So, did her nightmare, the nightmare that could have happened to 

your sister, your daughter, your niece, your friend.....

become a part of your holiday break entertainment binge???

The greatest amount of sympathy in all this should go to Teresa and her family.

And if you are one of those people that thinks her brother had anything to do with her loss, 

then you might want to head to the nearest psych ward, because that notion is pure lunacy.

You can learn more about Teresa here.