Currently and Catch Up

Hey there, friends! After two days of benchmark testing, I am SO ready for spring break! At least the kids have a test to work on during the 4 hour testing window - I just had to walk around and actively  monitor - booooooooring!

Anyway, I wanted to share just one more solar system activity we did two weeks ago. We read Margaret Wise Brown's The Important Book (I'm sure you all know it well!), and we discussed the way the author used lots of descriptions to explain to the reader why and how that item/object was important. Then, I told my kids they were going to write their own important book, but there was a catch - their whole book had to be about the sun, so everything they wrote needed to explain how and/or why the sun was important. I made each kid a book out of a single sheet of long construction paper, following this tutorial, and they turned out so great! Here's what a few of my kids thought was important about the sun:

This student made his own copyright page - the little rocket says, "Better than Scholastic!" - haha!

Love this illustration (and isn't his handwriting beautiful?!).

He wrote, "The sun makes the moon gloe (glow)." - shows me he was paying attention during our moon studies!

I love that this student drew the orbital lines with his planets!

I was proud of this student's connection of the sun to the water cycle - great thinking!

I am so on board with what this girl drew - I'm ready for sun, bathing suits, and laying out by the pool!

This idea (which came from our curriculum, interestingly enough - I'm not always on board with their suggestions, but I really loved this!) could easily be used with any subject or concept - you could make an important book about a character from a story, an animal, habitats, adding, subtracting, and whatever else you can think of! This activity was great because it was self-directed, and it showed me who had really learned the important concepts about the sun and who hadn't. My kids enjoyed making their books, and even asked if they could make more important books about the planets - my answer was an enthusiastic YES! :)

Now, on to this month's Currently, courtesy of Farley, of course! I created this yesterday, and then ended up not having time to post last night, so that's why my answers sound a little off, but still, here's what's up with me these days:

Your 3 words are supposed to be words that your students, friends, and family would use to describe you, and the words must start with the first letter of your last name. I think I'm a pretty reasonable teacher (I was also going to cheat and write "Really organized," but that's two words and organized doesn't start with R, but I thought it would be a good answer since my students actually DO tell other people that I am really organized!!), my friends know they can rely on me for just about anything, as long as it doesn't involve starting something after 10 pm, and my family definitely thinks I'm a bit random. I send stream of consciousness emails, I love tomato products but hate raw tomatoes, and I enjoy recreating the scene of Buddy the Elf on an escalator when I go to the mall. Maybe that makes me more ridiculous than random, but I digress...

Before I go, I found out yesterday that I was awarded a professional development grant I applied for a few weeks ago from my district (yay!). I'm so excited, because (a) this was my first time to ever apply for a grant and I got it (!!), and (b) it means I get to attend Debbie Diller's Summer 2012 conference in Houston. I'm only going to attend the first two days, since the third day seemed like it was geared more towards lower grades, but I was wondering if any of my blogging friends would also be in attendance? Since I won my funding through the grant, I'll be the only one attending from my school, and maybe even from my district, so it'll be a great opportunity to meet some new people. If you'll be attending, let me know, because I'd love to meet you!!

Now I'm off to start my spring break right - with a glass of vino and a line up of TV shows from Hulu. I'm already in my sweatpants; it can only get better from here. Happy spring break y'all!

Solar System Fun!

Hello friends! I wasn't intending to take this long to share with y'all some of the fun things we did for our solar system unit, but this past week I had a crazy messed up schedule, so I fell behind on everything, including blogging! Monday we had a staff development day, Wednesday I had a half day sub so I could complete a component of my ESL requirements, and Friday I had a sub because the third grade teachers had a planning day. Also, Friday evening, my boyfriend hosted a Star Party for my students and their families, and it was a blast! My students loved being able to use the telescopes, and it was awesome to hear the kids "teach" their parents what they'd learned about the planets, the moon, and constellations!

Anyway, here are a few of the fun activities we did during our unit:

Can you see the planet beads?

Planet necklaces! To make our necklaces, I used this search, and the first link (the one for a word document) is where I got my measurements. I didn't have enough black and white seed beads for each student, so instead of using those as spacers, I used the number of beads listed as a basis of measurement in centimeters. Then, after we measured the space between the planets on our string, we tied our planet beads directly onto the string. That definitely made this activity more challenging, but we figured out a few tricks along the way to help get the beads tied in place.

Solar system art is my favorite!

Look at those fabulous orbital lines and the correctly placed asteroid belt!

A close up of how the labels were used.

My students also created a model to show they'd learned the order of the planets as well as their distances from the sun. Students used a long piece of black construction paper to create their "space," and pictures of the planets (found here) to make their models. Then, since they had learned the order of the planets earlier that week, I simply gave them a page that had the names of the planets and 8 distances listed, but the distances were not in order! They had to use their knowledge of the order of the planets to make a connection to the distances, but it didn't take them long to figure out that Mercury, since it is the closest to the sun, must match the shortest distance, and so on. I also told them they had to include a drawing of the asteroid belt, and the only hint I gave them as a reminder of where it should be drawn is that it should separate the inner planets from the outer planets (which we had also learned about earlier that week). Not one student drew it in the wrong spot - yay for students who listen! I found the planet distances here, and you can find the worksheet I created with the planet labels and distances in my TpT store here.

We did several other projects, too, but these are the only ones I have pictures of! I hope you can use these ideas when it comes time for you to teach your class about the solar system! Now it's time for me to finish my lesson plans while watching the Oscars, but before I go, I also wanted to share a few pictures from our 50s Day last Friday - we always have a 50s dance the week of Valentine's, and this year I had more students than ever get into the spirit of things! Since we do this every year, I decided I needed to finally make myself a skirt that I could use again and again. So, the night before 50s Day, I stopped by Goodwill and found the perfect pink skirt - I took it home, sketched a quick drawing of a poodle, transferred it to a block of black felt I had from my craft stash, and then got to hot gluing! It took all of 15 minutes, and I love how it turned out! 

Step aside, Danny Zuko - these third graders are the new T-Birds!

Me and my girls in our pink poodle skirts!