April Showers Bring Reading Hours!

assign each student a partner and challenge students to a team reading competition.

Have each pair choose a book and read it together. When the partners have read a specified number of pages of the book, have them summarize their reading on a copy of the raindrop pattern. Then add their raindrop to the display.

When the contest ends, declare the partners with the most raindrops the champions.                       From Mailbox

Master the Rest of March

Master the rest of March and slide into a successful April by focusing on your students. 

At this time of year, it can be easy to get caught up in all the content we have to teach. But remember to keep your focus on the students. 

When things seem overwhelming, you can take a step back and find time to connect with and appreciate your students.

April Showers Bring May Flowers

Lifelong STEM Intelligence, Knowledge, and Capability

1. STEM thinking begins in infancy. STEM thinking starts in infancy. Even before a child’s first birthday, he/she is capable of making inferences, drawing conclusions about cause and effect, and reasoning about the probability of events.

2. To become strong STEM thinkers, children need more play. Guided play, where adults follow the child’s lead and shape the learning experience through thoughtful questions and interaction, has been shown to be particularly effective for teaching STEM content. STEM education should include robust, frequent, and varied opportunities for play through the third grade.

3. STEM amplifies language development; language enables STEM thinking. As children engage in STEM experiences, they hear and practice new words. Growing vocabularies allow children to make sense of increasingly complex ideas and phenomena, and early exposure to vocabulary used for concepts can support children later on to master higher order thinking.

4. Active, self-directed learning builds STEM skills and interest. Hands-on STEM learning is not only more fun, it is also more effective at helping children make sense of information that is complex or abstract.

5. Mindset matters to STEM success. Adults need to support children, particularly girls and children of color, to develop a growth mindset with the STEM disciplines.

 6. Children’s abstract thinking potential can be unlocked through both adult support and executive function skill development. By focusing on children’s STEM learning during the preschool and earlier elementary years, we can prepare them with the underlying dispositions for STEM thinking, equip them to meet school-based outcomes, and ready them for success in a STEM-rich economy and world.

STEM

Short Answer Question Strategy

S.T.E.M. at an Early Age, 
Reallllll Early

Here are some of ways you can encourage S.T.E.M. thinking skills from an early age.

1. Give children toys that have “manipulative elements” like balls and rattles. Ask children to control elements of these toys, like building higher towers or making the rattle softer or louder.

2. Have children explain how simple tools in your house work, like a can opener or a door hinge.

3. Allow infants to practice “repetitive play,” like dropping a spoon over and over, which helps the child learn about concepts like gravity long before they learn what gravity is.

4. Give children time to practice four kinds of play: pretend play that involves a child using their imagination; exploratory play where children create experiments or take things apart; guided play where adults play and interact with children, and free play without an adult involved.

5. Allow exploratory play (within reason and with safety in mind), even if that means a toddler may get dirty.

6. Ask “why,” “what” and “how” questions as much as possible to push children to explain their thinking.

7. Use complex and accurate vocabulary words, even with babies. Introduce them to words like “stable” when building a tower or “fragile” when touching objects.

8. Teach children that they are constantly learning by encouraging them to say,

“I can’t do this yet” instead of “I can’t do this.”                  http://hechingerreport.org

Spring Chick Craft

Your students will welcome spring with these easy-to-make fuzzy fellows.

What You Need:

• 9- by 12-inch yellow construction paper, one sheet for every 2 students
• 9- by 12-inch orange construction paper, one sheet for every 4 students
• Scissors
• Yellow feathers
• Glue
• Googly eyes, at least two per student

What You Do:

1. Before class, cut the 9- by 12-inch yellow construction paper into halves so you have at least one half-sheet for each student. Cut the orange construction paper into quarters, enough for each student to have one quarter-sheet.
2. In class, give each student a half-sheet of yellow construction paper and a quarter-sheet of orange construction paper.
3. Have your students use the orange construction paper to cut two feet shapes and a triangle for a beak, as shown.
4. Have your students select enough yellow feathers to cover their yellow construction paper. If the feathers are long, help your students trim some of them to give the chick some fluff.
5. Have your students carefully glue the yellow feathers to one side of the yellow construction paper, covering the entire surface. Set these aside to dry.
6. When the feather-covered yellow construction paper is dry, have your students orient the paper vertically on their desk and glue two googly eyes near the top of the paper, on top of the feathers.
7. Have your students glue the orange beak below the eyes and the orange feet near the bottom edge of the chick, as shown.         Scholastic

Testing is Quickly Approaching

Five Websites to Teach Coding

1. Code.org

Code.org is a website that is heavily advertised for their “Hour of Code” program.  Some schools have a goal to have students complete one hour of coding per year.  How will they ever learn with only one hour?! Code.org came up with a great feature called Code Studio. This allows teachers to add their students in a class and track their progress as they complete coding levels.  It is a great assessment tool.

2. Scratch.MIT.edu

This site was founded by MIT and provides essential coding skills to all children for 21^st century learning.  This site provides over 40 languages and is used in homes, schools, community centers, and libraries.  Using Scratch helps students create and share stories with each other and teachers. Students of all ages can use Scratch and it also allows for an interactive experience in the classroom.

3. Code Monkey

Code Monkey is a programming site allowing students to use real programming language.  This site is accompanied with lesson plans to help teachers without any computer programming experience.  The full curriculum is included and tracks student progress and achievements. The theme of the site is a cute monkey trying to gain his bananas back from a gorilla.  This game-based experience makes kids think they aren’t even coding at all!

4. Botlogic.us

Botlogic is a great puzzle game that is suitable for children of all ages. This computational puzzle teaches logic to students while introducing them to basic programming skills.  A small robot must make his way through the maze without running out of battery charge.  Students get creative by figuring out the least number of commands our robot friend must take to complete the maze.

5. Tynker

Tynker provides coding games for children ages 7 and up. These fun-filled games begin with visual block based coding and eventually move on to Java and Python.  Along with Tynker, comes curriculum, standards, and training for educators (which most of us may need). Tynker provides STEM lessons, robotic lessons, as well as Minecraft for children to explore.

Older Than Dirt

JUST FOR FUN!!!

To Whom It May Concern

This activity will help students really connect with history. Review with students the British actions that enraged colonists and eventually led to the Revolutionary War. Then have each child choose the act that, for him/her, seems most offensive. Next, guide the student to imagine that he/she is an angry colonist who writes a letter of protest to the British Parliament or King George. In his/her letter, he/she describes the law and then explains how it is unfair. When a student is ready to write his/her final draft, have him/her tape a feather to his/her pen or pencil and then write his/her letter in his/her best handwriting. After students finish their letters, have parent volunteers bring in tea and cookies for students to enjoy as they read their letters aloud.

W.4.1; W.5.1 Opinion writing

Mailbox

February 2018 Calendar

Using Historical Thinking Skills

The impact of Martin Luther King, Jr. on American society and politics is immeasurable. His efforts to bring equality to all races living in America led to lasting change and still hold an important place in all American history curricula. As we celebrate the legacy of Dr. King on the third Monday of January every year, it is important to find fresh ways to teach our students about his life, while still incorporating some of the essential reading, writing, and thinking skills students need.

Let’s look at Dr. King’s most memorable speech with a focus on historical thinking skills.

Close Reading:

Close reading asks students to determine a source’s point of view and purpose.  For example, Dr. King’s famous I Have a Dream speech includes the sections:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Students can break down each line to determine the vision that Dr. King had for his country. They can then summarize the entire section by analyzing the interpretation for each line.

To help students see the speech from an ELA perspective, Presentation Magazine offers a compositional analysis of the speech.

Contextualization:

Contextualizing is the skill that asks students to look at the facts and events surrounding a particular document that may have influenced its creator. To fully understand the context of Dr. King’s message we must look at race relations and segregation in America in 1963. Teaching Tolerance offers a five lesson teacher’s guide to their film A Time for Justice: America’s Civil Rights Movement which chronicles the civil rights movement from the 1954 ruling in Brown vs. the Board of Education to the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act. The guide includes primary sources, interactive activities, and the background information that give Dr. King’s words context.

For upper elementary students, Scholastic provides a brief overview of the same era. It provides context for Dr. King’s speech, but does not require a lot of class time to convey much of the same information.

Corroboration:

Corroborating a source’s content is when students locate other sources that back up or contradict the source being analyzed. In trying to corroborate Dr. King’s words, students can be presented with various speeches.

Here are two examples:
The first is by Alabama governor George Wallace, that says, in part,

and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

The second example is from President John Kennedy, which says:

This afternoon, following a series of threats and defiant statements, the presence of Alabama National Guardsmen was required on the University of Alabama to carry out the final and unequivocal order of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Alabama. That order called for the admission of two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to have been born Negro.

Students should use excerpts of these speeches to corroborate Dr. King’s characterization of a country that is divided and unequal. Students can also use these speeches to make a claim about American society in the 1960s.

Sourcing:

To properly source a document, students must determine if the who, when, and where of a document makes it more or less reliable. All three of our speeches were given in 1963. We know from our contextualizing, that America was in a state of racial turmoil at the time. In our corroborating, we learn that the speeches by President Kennedy and Governor Wallace highlight the issues stated by Dr. King. All sources seem to be a reliable source of history of the time they were created.

Dr. Martin Luther King is a monumental figure in American history. His contributions cannot be overlooked. With some of the sources and activities above, you can honor his work and memory, while still integrating the skills our students need. To learn more about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., have students listen to the Read-Aloud: Martin Luther King, Jr. which offers a short overview of his life.

Taken from Hep Teaching

Activities for Using Wikki Sticks

This map uses Wikki Stix to show how America was settled. It includes the dates of each land acquisition, and each land area is outlined in a different color. Taken from Mailbox