Five for Friday

I'm back with another Five for Friday post, sharing some of the highlights from this week! Link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share your week and join in the fun :)

This week we started playing Prodigy for math practice. My students are HOOKED! So many of them are playing at home too- you know that's a sign you've found a good game. A 5th grade teacher at my school told me about it, prodigygame.com and I'm so glad she did! The game is set up like like a video game, where you have characters that do battles and you can buy pets and outfits. It reminds me of Zelda meshed with Neopets from back in my day :) You can assign standards or just set the grade level and they work on what they need. I highly suggest you check it out for your students!

Did you know that if you mix cornstarch with shaving cream you get fluffy playdough??? Well I didn't until about 5 days ago and I saw it on Pinterest. We just finished our unit on Landforms with this fun activity that was a little messy.. I suggest doing it outside if you can :)

The wait is finally over! I've mentioned in a few posts that we ordered giant blue blocks and they took about a month to come in. In the meantime we enjoyed medium blocks that we recieved free through Imagination Playground's referral program! The look on the kids faces were priceless!

We just took the last test of 3rd grade!!!! Well.. except the main test... the dreaded EOG haha. So we finished up with graphing and from now till May 22nd we'll review.

Our farm update is that we're kickin' it up a notch with our soap sales! I started up an Etsy show this week to showcase our soap at https://www.etsy.com/in-en/shop/RandRFarm

I may enlist the help of the photography class to get some fancier pictures of our products, but still exciting to get it up and running and spread the word on our goat milk soap!

I hope everyone had a great week, and enjoys the weekend! I'm looking forward to netflix binging :)

Rock on,

Diana

Five for Friday

It's finally Friday! Whew what a week it's been and I could definitely go for a nap but I'm just glad I made it :)

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share my highlights from the week and I hope you join in the fun too and link up, or share a highlight in the comments!

I've posted about our medium blocks before, but the uses for them just keep coming, that I can't stop sharing them! We recently raised money for a set of Big Blue Blocks from Imagination playground and for referring our school we received a set of medium blocks free! I've shared a few pictures of what the kiddos created in other posts, but this week we made land forms with the blocks to review our science unit. They really had to think about the shapes and important attributes of the land forms to recreate them, so it was an exciting activity to see the learning going on!

We've also been having some fun with vocabulary and we made some games this week to go over the land form vocabulary but also vocab for volume and mass measurements. In this 2 week unit there were 15 totally new vocabulary words! So yeah.. we had to get interactive with those words and we played some taboo and charades! I go into more detail on this blog post from yesterday about our fun vocab games!

We had an art party this week and it was a blast! My students earn points for finishing assignments and at the end of the week they get a paycheck. They're paid $5 a point, so they're usually looking at $100 a week. Well, they can buy a class party for $2,000 and would you know these smarty pants pooled all of their money together and bought one! They voted on an art party and we had fun painting, using pastels, making bead crafts, and origami!

I have a Lularoe addiction and I have no intention of seeking help for this problem. I should be getting this totally adorable Amelia dress in the mail next week. IT HAS POCKETS!!!

I like to make #5 a farm update because my babies are a big part of my life! I was totally cracking up at our fainting goat, Brooks, because he likes to stick his entire head in the hay bin when he eats.

Hope your week wasn't like Brooks!

Rock on,

Diana

Vocabulary on the Fly

I'm a big fan of working smarter, not harder, so as I was planning my unit for volume and mass I knew it was jam packed with vocabulary that we'd need to get a handle on. I wanted to find some interactive games and activities that didn't take me hours to prepare. So here we are, vocabulary on the fly!

Clump & Dump

We played clump and dump this week and it only took me about 10 minutes to write the words on cards. I took some index cards and cut them up (I'm running low on supplies!) and had 15 cards for each of my table groups. On those cards I wrote their vocabulary words related to our math topic of volume and mass. I gave them their "dumpster" of words, now we need to "clump" them into categories. At first I let them choose their own categories, to see how they found them to relate to each other. This was really neat to see the connections they made!

After they worked with their group to clump their words, I asked them to now clump them differently. This time I wanted them to have a "volume" category and a "mass" category. This sort allowed me to do a quick check of understanding. I could have started with this, but I was curious to see what they wanted to categorize them on their own. I heard lots of great conversations of why certain words should go with certain categories. They're talking about the vocabulary words and their meanings! You can't beat it!

Charades & Taboo

Charades and Taboo are already such fun games, adding your own vocabulary words to them makes these games easy to explain, play, enjoy, and learn! For charades all you have to do is have your vocabulary words written on slips of paper. A student will then pick a piece of paper and they must act out that vocabulary word without saying anything! I like to have my students in the audience write their guesses on white boards, so they're practicing the spelling of the vocab and it keeps it from getting a little too crazy.

For taboo, you have the vocabulary word at the top of the card and have 3-4 words of phrases below it that cannot be used to describe it. You could spend some time making your own cards, or better yet, let your students make the cards! They have to come up with the top 3-4 words that describe that vocabulary word. I loved seeing the connections they made to words, like for mountain one student wrote avelanch! I wouldn't think of that one right away, but makes sense! The actual game of taboo is exciting as well because you see students really thinking about the vocab and describing it in different ways than the typical definition. 

Graphic Organizers & Frayer Model

Before you really get into the games, I like to do graphic organizers or the frayer model with my students so they can look at each word a little more in depth. My students know the drill when it comes to the frayer model and draw their own box divided into fourths. The first box is the definition, then an example, then the vocabulary word used in a sentence, and finally a picture. To spice it up from the typical frayer boxes I sometimes let my students create their own graphic organizers. No need to run copies when students create their own sort of map with squiggly clouds, bubbles, or geometric shapes. They enjoy making it their own, but by having it split up into sections they can use each section for a purpose such as the definition, examples, synonyms, non-examples, etc. These activities are very meaningful to organize their thoughts and explore the words in more ways than one. It also doesn't take a lot of time, so you can make graphic organizers on the fly!

If you are fortunate enough to have ipads in your classroom I really recommend the app "popplet". Popplet allows you to make virtual bubble maps where you can type text, make pictures with a draw feature, upload photos from the camera roll or web, and embed links or videos from the web. It's fairly easy to do, so after a quick tutorial your kiddos can be independent and make bubble maps in minutes!

Mini Books

Last but not least, I suggest having a place where your students can keep all of their vocabulary. I wish I had room for a word wall in my classroom but space is tight, so all of my students have their own personal "word wall" or mini vocabulary booklet. In the past I've spent hours assembling booklets with borders, clipart, and fun font. I've also spent 5 minutes getting out paper and told my students to make their own- guess what they liked better? They LOVE to personalize their own booklet, and the fact that it's mini makes it even niftier! They can be made with just paper folded in half or if you can get your hands on some paper bags those can be used for the cover. Those take a little longer to assemble, but the kiddos love the crinkly vintage look they have.

I hope you enjoy these little fun ways to bring vocabulary into your lesson plans! I think the most meaningful games are ones the children help create. It saves you time, but most importantly it brings some higher order thinking to those kiddos by creating it themselves!

Rock on,

Diana

Five for Fraturday

I couldn't get my act together to post Friday so here I am, five for Fraturday! :) I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share our highlights from the week!

This being our first week back from Spring break we did some review! We played 3rd grade math jeopardy, and worked on multiplication with various games!

After our review games Monday we got an awesome surprise in the mail! We recently purchased a big blue block set from Imagination Playground. As a thank you for referring our school to get the blocks, they sent us a medium set for free! We have had so much fun creating! I even taught a landforms lesson and the kiddos made the landforms with the blocks! It's been a blast having these around this crazy week :)

A robot!

This group and their "lake".

Pretty proud kiddo of his "valley".

So it's the week after spring break.. Perfect time for a FIELD TRIP! I'm by sure if that's sarcasm in my own voice but hey, gets the kids pumped to be back at school. We went to the museum of life and science in Durham, NC. 

Butterfly exhibit

Alpacas!! Next on my list for the farm :)

Dinosaurs!!!

Ok so we played review games, got cool big blocks, went on a field trip.. So why not get a new class pet too! Yep I've lost it haha! Meet Gizmo!

The farm update is probably the least exciting, but still brings a smile to my face to collect these beauties everyday from the coop! 

Hope you all had an excellent week and I'm off to nap!

Rock on,

Diana