Survival in Environment Science and Art Integration!

     In 5th grade we get to teach traits and heredity! Super fun! One of the standards we teach is about how animals or plants have to adapt in order to survive in their environment. My brilliant co-worker came up this an art integration activity that I absolutely loved and wanted to share!

     She gave each student a small magazine clipping (just cut it out at random). Then she asked them to glue it onto the page and make it adapt to the environment by using elements of color and line. The students got very creative! I am always so shocked to see what students come up with! Here are some examples from her class! Can you find the magazine clippings?!

Dr. Seuss Day!

     I just love Dr. Seuss day! Mainly, because I have an excuse to wear jeans to school as part of my "costume"! 

    (teacher 1 and teacher 2)!!!

     We always do a whole 5th grade Dr. Seuss day where we rotate between each teacher to do activities. In my room this year I had to do the cliche' Oobleck! Although the students LOVE this lesson, and I mean LOVE! I had every student asking me at the end, how to make Oobleck at home to show their family! Success!
  
   So here is what I do. I start off by reading Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss. Then I tell the students that they are going to get to touch this Oobleck. I have Oobleck already prepared with lots of butcher paper on the floor and tables, since it get's messy. I break my class into 2 groups. One group gets to go touch and explore the Oobleck, while the other gets to have fun at our Dr. Seuss Photo Booth! Then they switch! Luckily this year I had a parent volunteer come help so I had someone who could take pictures of my students. Although last year I just set up my computer to be on a timer and let the students self-run the photo booth. This is a great Science Integration because while they are touching the Oobleck we discuss whether this is a solid, or liquid and what types of properties this substance has. Super fun! I love seeing some students get into it and some others who will poke it with their finger, decide it is gross, and just watch everyone else play with goop.

     The next rotation was a STEM activity that involves making The Lorax Truffula trees! I shared this idea with my co-worker after finding it on Pinterest. Here is the link! Since we were short on time he gave the students colored marshmallows instead of food coloring them! Brilliant!

                                       

 The last rotation was a graphing activity! This worked out great because that the unit we just finished in math, so it was a great review. My co-worker read the story Green Eggs and Ham. Every time they heard a word that rhymed with ham on that page they would mark it on the graph. Then after the book was over, they added up all of the words on the page and found the average (they divided that number by how many pages were in the book). This was a great review for finding the average by using a graph!
   
    I love any excuse to integrate other subjects into fun activities! I am lucky I love my job and have great students and co-workers!

Compare and Contrast activity!

     This is my first post and I have to give all the credit to Teaching with a Mountain View! She did a great job at creating an engaging activity to introduce students to compare and contrast. I had been contemplating how to start teaching this concept to my students when I came across this activity. It has a picture book, involves food, and is funny! A perfect lesson!

     This lesson uses the book Apples and Oranges by Sara Pinto. I have my students sit on the carpet as I introduce the words compare and contrast. Then we go through the book together as they fill out the worksheet that goes along with it. For each page there are two items the students need to compare and contrast (such as an apple and an orange). Then it asks them to guess what they both don't have. I decided to have the students fill out the "They both don't have..." column on their own. Then I would turn the page. If the students got it right (they rarely do, because the book comes up with some crazy things such as apples and oranges both don't have glasses) then they got a little reward. This keeps the students very engaged and kept them on task. They could only participate in the fun challenge when they could come up with three ways that they compared and contrasted.

    I had students giggling and laughing throughout this whole lesson because they couldn't believe what this author had come up with. 

    If you are interested in the activity and getting the worksheet here is a a link to the blog Teaching with a Mountain View.