Wanted Posters: Math Idea from Across the Hall

The teacher across the hall had a cute display up that I thought I would share. All it takes is some brown paper, a little crinkling, a marker, and some math skills with imagination!

Students created a wanted poster about a number and then completed a few lines describing the number and why they were wanted. I thought that this idea could easily be adapted for students to describe multiplication facts (such as the many disguises of the number 12-- 2*6, 3*4, etc.), factorization, among other ideas. 

Posted below were a few of my favorites! 

  

Be sure to check out more ideas at I {Heart} Recess!

 

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Art Display, End of the Quarter, & Giveaway!!

While the last few days have looked something a little more like this of late:

I'm loving how my graduate midterms and the end of the first 9 weeks are coinciding together... I currently have no life. I'm also halfway through this semesters worth of classes and will be down to just one in the spring, hopefully by then, I can get the mass amount of pictures from my camera, to the computer to blog; as well as catch up on lots of blog reading!

Aside from the rather bleak view of grad work and grades, our hallways have livened up greatly thanks to our wonderful art teacher. Check out this display!

I love how this little girl wrote that "Art makes my life more inspiring"

Great tag line "Art is Hands-On...and Touches our Life!"

Such a fun display! 

Speaking of fun things. My blogging buddy Jessica from I {Heart} Recess, is celebrating a year of blogging with a huge giveaway that celebrates each month of the year and then some! Click the picture to check it out and enter to win! :)

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Skeleton Craftiness!

Let me premise this little project by saying...

A) You should be sure your students have a firm understanding of cursive.
      I discovered several of my kiddos are not... and cursive just looks cooler.

B) Do not attempt on a day that also has a field trip.
      My kiddos were filled with several ounces more of excitement.

C) Allow more time than you may think.

D. Enjoy a pretty cute Halloween-esk craft, with some symmetry and fun!

Start with a piece of white construction paper (to construct the main trunk of the body). I cut mine so that it would be smaller than the black construction paper background. I used the piece cut off for the other assorted body parts that could be added later.

Then, in cursive write your name ALONG the fold.  I suppose, you could do it in print... I thought cursive added a little something. When I bubbled the letters in the next step I added my dot and crossing of the "t". For the letters that hang low...I just had students drawl them up high, as seen in the example above.

 

I quickly bubbled out the letters. Drawing out the same letters only a quarter to a half inch further out worked well. I made sure that the dot to my "i" was connected to the base. 

 

Next part is TRICKY!  You want to cut out the letters, but you also want to leave some of the letters attached to the fold. You can see the a little on the bottom of the "c" and you can tell where I could leave part of the "h" easily connected.

It's easier to see here where things were connected in this picture. Cutting above the letter is easier... I helped several students with the below part (the part connected to the fold). Making the cuttings between letters and in between letters (like inside the "s") really add a lot to the skeleton body. 

Then fold out! I thought my "C's" made for good feet, and the "t's" looked like arms, so I didn't add a whole lot to my end product.

You can see my set up here. All I did was add my head and glue it on my black paper. Faces could be added to the skeleton by cutting them out or drawing them on.



 The following our some of our finished products. For the tag line I said "No Bones About It: 4th Grade is Great!"

A Halloweenish and unique display. The symmetry adds a lot, and the patterns that can be seen in the names is fun!

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Student Motivation Saturday: Mentor Sentences

What a beautiful fall morning, to finally find a few spare moments to get back to my blog, by joining one of my blogging buddies Joanne with Student Motivation Saturday!

 

We have been using another blogging buddy, Jivey's Mentor Sentences since the first part of the year {crazy to think conferences are almost here! Where is all of that time going?} It took a week or two for students to understand the process, but now they LOVE it!

The added details on this board mostly came from freebies. You can check out where here.

Their favorite part of the week is when they have a chance to revise and imitate. I created a bulletin board that changes weekly {usually with a picture of the mentor text on it as well... forgot it this last week, whoops!} and the students eagerly work and beg to be on the board. I teach multiple sections of communications, so I can only pick a few from each section to make it on the board. It's a pretty huge honor for the kiddos who make it. I've also been keeping track so that every student will have their chance to shine.

Whoops... missed the second missing comma in the bottom one.

What sticks out to me, is the amount of hands that shoot up throughout the week when it's time to share. I've been in classrooms that use Daily Oral Language, and in my experience, it was like pulling teeth to get a response that wasn't "add a capital" or "add a period" (even if the punctuation should have been a question or exclamation point.)

Want to motivate your students to become involved in the ELA curriculum, excited, and learning? Dig out some of those great works of children's literature and use them as mentor texts. There are some great products out there that take out the work in putting mentor sentences together in easy to implement formats (see one from Jivey and one from the Collaboration Cuties.)

I encourage you to check them out!

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Classroom "App"lications: Fun with Prepositions

The last couple of weeks I've put my student's through a mini-grammar boot camp. We were struggling to keep the different parts of speech straight, a two week review was set up and the kiddos started to remember their nouns, verbs, and adjective, etc. much better than before.

Then came prepositions. Our English book was no help. Two worksheets and a lack luster lesson idea. No way, would that sink in! As a result I had to spice things up a bit... luckily it was a beautiful fall day,  we had our iPads, and a fun preposition lesson began.

We talked about prepositions, what they do, and said a jingle from Shirley English, a couple of times to get a feel for some of the prepositions (there is quite a lengthy list). I then put a slightly longer list of prepositions at each table for student's to take a picture of.

From there, the lesson became more fun. We journeyed out into the fabulous fall day, in our table groups, and tried to capture as many prepositions that we could. Before journeying out we covered the basics of iPad safety, playground safety, and the fact that not every single preposition could be photographed (ex. about).

The kids did a great job. I tried to snap a few photos while the kids were working. The student's really got creative, I wish I could have captured a few more ideas.

Monday, we spent a little time making a keynote. One picture per slide with the one preposition being illustrated on the slide as well. Then we shared out keynotes with our table groups.  A fun way to use technology and help cement in prepositions. 

What do you do to incorporate the iPad the your instruction? Be sure to link up your ideas all month long!

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