Friday, April 18, 2014

landform and measurement ideas

Spring weather has finally arrived in Chicago!  Last week we were on spring break and even enjoyed an 80 degree day!  Almost made you forget about our long  cold and snowy winter.    Of course when we went back to work this past Monday it was cold and rainy.   It even snowed for a bit one day this past week.  Like the saying goes if you don't like the weather in Chicago wait 5 minutes and it will change.  

Before spring break we had a math/science Open House.  I just wanted to share some of things that we had on display in our classroom.  With all the stress of MAP testing and students meeting their goals, implementing a new language arts series, and flexible grouping for the first time as a grade level it has definitely been a stressful year.  Unfortunately I feel like we don't have time to do the fun things anymore with the students.  So with Open House I wanted to put some fun back into learning.  I had found this idea on Pinterest (Don't know who the original idea came from; if I find out I will give credit to that person.)  We  have been studying landforms in science so I had the students create landforms from clay.


I did change it up a bit from the idea on Pinterest.  I used paper plates from Target instead of painting.  I just made one cut on each of the paper plates and put them together to form the water and land.  Each student had to make a glacier, island, lake, pond, volcano, mountain, and hill.  Turned out to be a great hands on project and the students were able to identify the landforms.

The second project didn't quite come out like we had expected.  We went through our science funds to purchase seeds, pots,  and soil.  By the time we got the supplies it was just a short few days before the Open House and we had gotten small individual cups.  They were just too tiny and I didn't feel like using them so I improvised and used some extra book boxes instead.  The purpose of this was to have students measure the grass and flowers that grew.  As you can tell we didn't get much growth.






As you can tell we didn't get much growth within the week.  I had lined the whole book box with grass seeds in hopes of getting some growth.  Next year I know to just purchase things on my own and start a little earlier.  I have done this before and it is a great hands on activity to use in your measurement unit.  Plus the students love to watch things grow.  

Hope everyone is enjoying their holiday weekend.
Happy Easter!