Electricity and Magnetism Vocabulary Games

Here are three games and some extra reading to practice the vocabulary for our Houghton Mifflin Electricy and Magnetsim Unit. These are words you will need to know for the upcoming unit test. So be smart and have fun reviewing!


Crossword Puzzle
E-Word Game
Word Find
Cricket Connections for Chapter 15

How to draw a dragon

This week we will be reading about Komodo dragons. Today we learned how to follow directions in order to draw a fantastic dragon. For those who want to try this at home, you can find the directions and tutorial here.

You can learn to draw a Komodo dragon at these web sites:
How to draw a Komodo dragon
How to draw a Komodo dragon step by step for kids

Digital Poetry Inspired by The Red Wheelbarrow

This is our second successful attempt at creating digital poetry. Again we used a William Carlos Williams Poem as our inspiration. This time we used "The Red Wheelbarrow". After writing the poems, we read the wonderful book "Love that Dog" together. This book shows the interactions between a teacher and a student as a boy, Jack, is inspired to write poetry based on famous poems. Of course, one of the pivotal poems in the book is "The Red Wheelbarrow". We also wrote a class poem together, which came out fantastic. Lillian produced the video for the class poem.








Here is an Animoto I made last year for the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow".
This post from my Mount Pleasant School days tells about the digital poetry project based on "The Red Wheelbarrow" and shows some of my fourth grader's poems.
Here are poems that last year's fifth grade class wrote.

The first video is for a poem the class wrote together to model the steps in writing a poem. I wanted them to make the last stanza a prepositional phrase, but they also came up with some alliteration along the way. I really like the poem they wrote together. The rest of the poems the student's wrote were just as enjoyable. This was the first time the class got to use the digital camera and "Love that Dog" books funded from two different Donors Choose projects.

FREE Everyday Math Apps for the iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad

McGraw-Hill Education, publishers of our Everyday Math program, are offering five Everyday Math Apps for FREE on Novemebr 7-11, 2011. Go here or to the iTunes App store. If you have one of these devices, it would be great to get these apps for free and turn off Angry Birds for just a bit!

Science Vocabulary Games for our Energy Unit

Here are three games to practice the vocabulary for our Houghton Mifflin Energy and Motion Unit. Some of the words we have been introduced to already. Others are from future lessons, but why not review and get ahead when you are looking for something to do. These are the words you will need to know for the unit test.

Unit F: Energy and Motion

Chapter 14: Energy Changes
eWord Game
Crossword Puzzle
Word Find

Free Music Friday: Creaking Door

I played this song for the class last month and some of them really liked it and asked if they could hear it again. I am posting it on the class blog so that they can listen or even download it for free. C'mon it is better than Justin Beiber! Well, I am proud too, because Andrew Hansen is my son and this is his song. You can listen to "Creaking Door" here.




Andrew is a student at Gordon College in Massachusetts. For an internship this summer, he worked at Regenerate Music Studio in Tennessee and had a blast. There are three take aways for the class: 1) find a passion and explore it (2) college is not just about work-you can pursue your passion while you are there and (3) Andrew is pretty good at this stuff. Andrew is self taught at the guitar, singing, and writing music.  "Creaking Door" is a song Andrew wrote,  recorded and produced, as well as doing all the singing and the guitars. He did have some studio friends add the bass and drums.

Besides enjoying the song and being proud of Andrew, it does make you feel old when your own son sings nostagically about wishing he was younger.

Digital Tree Poetry

We have begun making our first digital poems. We are exploring words and how they relate to each other  through the model of William Carlos Williams poem "The Locust Tree in Flower". the words in the poem don't seem to relate to each other as in a sentence or even through the phrasing of a typical poem, but when you read the poem through a few times, one can see how they all fit together. I liken the poem to words written on puzzle pieces, mixed up and then randomly placed into the poem, with some words missing. We used the trees in front of New Searles School on a crisp and beautiful fall day to inspire the words we wrote. Then we mixed up the words like puzzle pieces to create our own poems following the "rules" that William Carlos Williams used: a title, 13 words, one word per line, 4 stanzas of 3 words, and a final word at the end.

I then introduced the class to Animoto and we learned to upload the pictures, write out the poem, and arrange it with music, so that we could share the poem online. As you can see they came out fantastic. You can find out more about this lesson on my teaching blog and this blog.

Here is the first time I developed up and used this lesson with a class (Mt. Pleasant School grade 4).
New Searles fifth grade class 2010-2011





by Ryan



by John



  by Alycia



 by Maya



  by Rebecca



  by Alex



  by Mackenzie



by Kayla



by Joey



by Nathan Z.
 


by Nathan F.