The Primary Years: science

The Importance Of Design Thinking

November 05, 2017

Ever since I started teaching, I have wanted to add some type of “Maker Space” into my classroom. This year, I finally figured out a way to make it happen! I thought it would be helpful to share what I have learned from incorporating this type of area into my classroom and lessons.

1. Organization and easy access are key. First, I put my "Maker Space" in a cabinet. It was too hard for my students to get to the materials and for me to keep up organizing them, etc. Having "user friendly" organization also allows your students to take ownership of the entire space.

2. There are certain simple skills that are helpful to teach to young students (in addition to the exploration time that they have with the materials).

3. Design thinking lessons are vital to adding purpose to lessons that incorporate a "Maker Space."

4. These types of designing lessons can be incorporated with any subject area!

Below are some examples of lessons my students have done.

Reading: My students read "The Most Magnificent Thing" and then had to come up with a problem in their life to solve, just like the main character did. Then they designed something to solve the problem.
Math: When learning about Even & Odd, my students designed and create their own "Even Monster" and "Odd Monster" using items and technology available to them.
Science & Social Studies: When learning about Properties of Solids & Fire Safety, my students thought about the properties of different solids and used those properties to make the tallest ladder they could.

You can also find some other makerspace activities we love to do here.

Hopefully this helps you in your journey to incorporate new and exciting ways to add purpose to what your students are learning!

Oh, and if you try out a new makerspace activity in your classroom, I recommend taking this course so that you can earn Professional Development credit for trying out the lesson!

Happy Teaching!

Pumpkin Palooza!

October 31, 2017

It's a Pumpkin Party!

Today was filled with so much pumpkin fun!

We started out by reading all about pumpkins!

Then we spent time measuring how tall our pumpkin was, finding out it if would float or sink, measuring how wide it was, how many seeds were in it, and more! Unfortunately, we were so busy I forgot to take pictures!

After reading, we talked about the pumpkin life cycle and created our own mini pumpkin life cycle booklet.

We learned sequencing terms and did this pumpkin craftivitiy.

Finally, we planted a pumpkin and are going to spend the next few weeks observing the life cycle of a pumpkin! We planted some seeds into a pumpkin and others into cups for each of the children. The pictures I took didn't turn out. I hope our pumpkins turn out as well as the one in the picture above!

We also made a pumpkin volcano which the students thought was so fun to watch!

How To Make A Kid Friendly Maze

October 30, 2017

Last week, my 1st graders made these Spooky Halloween Mazes as a connection to the book The Roll-Away Pumpkin.

Here's how to make one of your own:

Cover a box with construction paper. I used the box tops that go with the boxes that hold printer paper.
Put some paint in each students box (whatever color they wanted). Then they each got 5 marbles. They put the marbles in the box top and rolled it around. This created a marble art background! This also painted the marbles - which I told the students were supposed to represent the pumpkin in the story.
We spent about an hour making the bumpers.
I gave each student a cauldron to place at the end of the maze. In the story, the pumpkin lands in a cauldron.
They placed their cauldron & bumpers where they thought they were like them. They had their finger pretend to be the marble and practiced running the maze to make sure the maze was how they wanted.
They used stick glue to glue their bumpers down.
I hot glued their cauldron and also created a little ramp for the marbles to use to get into the cauldron.

Making Reading Come Alive!

October 29, 2017

It's the Roll Away Pumpkin!

After reading this book, I told the students that I noticed a pumpkin note sitting on my desk and I was thinking that maybe the Roll-Away pumpkin was rolling through our school! They were so excited to go hunt for the pumpkin!

The hunt led us back to our classroom where I we found some fun science experiment materials!

The students were so excited and loved using these materials to make a volcanic pumpkin!

The next day, we re-read the story. I reminded the students about how great it is to re-read stories because each time we read it, we notice new things. This time, the students noticed that this story is similar to the gingerbread man story.

After reading, we incorporated brought the story to life by using STEAM and creating pumpkin mazes.

They had so much fun creating these mazes and were so proud with how they turned out! I could barely get them to stop playing the mazes as they walked out of school that day - they were obsessed!

Three for the Third Day of School!

August 28, 2017

Just Like Me!

During our morning meeting this morning, I LOVED our morning meeting activity. Some background: Yesterday, we made mini-versions of ourselves and learned that no 2 people are alike and that our differences make each of us special! So this morning during our meeting, I had the students go around in a circle and share something that made them special. For example: I have 1 sister. Then everyone who that statement was true for too would sit up, point to themselves, & say "Just Like Me!" Literally, such a sweet way to start the morning!

My next favorite were these scientists we made. I always wish my science lessons had a craft to go with it to work on those fine motor skills. Well after reading about sweet Ada Twist, we talked about what a scientist does. The students then made themselves as scientists and wrote a wondering they have.

DISASTER MASTER

So after lunch, the students came into the classroom to a HUGE disaster. Tables were flipped over, books were knocked out everywhere, papers were just thrown about, all of our math materials were dumped over, etc. We soon discovered that our class mascot Stripes, had had some fun while we were at lunch.

We decided we needed to make some classroom agreements so that everyone would know what the expectations were and we wouldn't have this happen again. The students were more than happy to do this as they did not want to pick up another mess left by Stripes, or anyone else for that matter. They even signed their names at the bottom of the agreement to make sure of it ;)

Bonus: At some point today, one of my firsties raised his hand several times & asked several questions in a row. After asking them he commented loudly to himself "I sure ask a lot of questions." #selfawareness #bless

Wrapping It All Up

December 17, 2016

Some fun Winter themed activities that we've been doing...

After learning all about snowflakes in science, we made these snowflakes that the students could hang at their home - on their tree, wall decor, whatever works for them!

In math, we learned about how wrapping paper is made up of patterns. We then made wrapping paper that they could take home to wrap their gifts in.

Before Winter Break, I give the students these gifts of crayons and an activity book filled with things that can help keep them busy over the break (and to help prevent any Winter slide).

Rocktober & More

October 29, 2016

Is it just me or does this little ghosty crack you up? I adore him!

We spent the month of October learning all about rocks!

We spent the last few days of our unit exploring all about caves - from how caves form to the parts of a cave to cave formations to animals that live in caves. We then wrapped up our rocktober fun by taking a field trip to the Inner Space Caverns. If there is a cavern near you - I would definitely suggest taking a trip there. The students LOVED it! And totally connected it with their learning - a few things I heard during the field trip...

"Are we in the twilight zone?"

"Oh, look! We are entering the mouth of the cave!"

"I hope we see some bats!"

"Oh cool! A stalagmite, a stalagmite, a column!"

It was so fun to see their learning being connected to a real life experience!!

We did some fun cave activities (which of course I did not take pictures of...whomp, whomp...)

Here a some fun bat/cave activities we did

Top left: Text to Self Connection. We read a bat book and on the back of that craftivity we included our text to self connection written response.

Top right: We began our unit on addition by creating a visual, a math sentence, and a word sentence to show the addition that was happening.

Bottom left: After learning all about bats, we wrote about what it would be like if we were a bat. Then we drew 3 pictures of different things that we wrote about.

Bottom right: BME activity after reading Stellaluna.

We then spent the remaining few days of October learning about the history of Halloween, themes of Halloweens - including pumpkins, and completing some "spooky" Halloween projects!

You can get this spider here.

First Grade Science Interactive Notebooks

September 22, 2016

This year I have started implementing science interactive notebooks in my classroom. Let me tell you it is LOVEEEEE!!

During the first week of school, we did a science journal entry about what science is.

Last week, we learned all about our senses. We did two journal pages. One about what the senses are and another day we did one with a popcorn science experiment. We used our senses to describe popcorn.