Stimulating Science Simulations

I've decided to link up with the Teaching Blog Addict for Friday Freebie ! Our entire building just got new bulletin boards.  Really big ones for right outside our doors in the hallway. This was a wonderful donation but you know what it means when you get a big bulletin board.  It must be covered.  So I began the hunt for a fabulous idea.  Here's what I ended up with and how I did it. I covered the board with some wrapping paper from the dollar tree.  It was pink with butterflies all over it.  I used a boarder that had a white picket fence and flowers to finish off the edges at the top and bottom of the bulletin board.  I found some laminated buggy accents and scattered them on the board. I decided on the title: "Science Doesn't Bug Us!" To make the title I used one of my favorite fonts and printed the letters. I cut the letters out to make my own letter templates and traced them onto a roll of bright blue contact paper. ...

5.L.2.2  Classify the organisms within an ecosystem according to the function they serve: producers, consumers, or decomposers (biotic factors). Last year, I purchased the "Follow That Food Chain" series.  These non-fiction adventure books are set up like a game.  Students begin by reading the introduction and then choosing a tertiary consumer from the ecosystem featured in each book.  From there, they read about the animal and continue to make choices that result in either survival and continuation along the food chain (which really becomes more of a food web) or a "dead end". Although my students can learn plenty from reading and interacting with this book, I was looking for a way to document their learning.  I decided to create a guided reading focus sheet for this purpose.   You can get a copy of it here.   Basically, students record the tertiary animal they chose. Then they read and respond with 3 facts they learned about the animal.  N...

Today we took the 5th grade students to Agape for an environmental educational experience.  What a blast!  If you have never gone into the woods with a group of urban kids, you have no idea what you're missing.  They get excited about the simplest things! Here's a brief run-down of our day and some pictures too. On the bus ride, students pointed out deforestation taking place and we took note of tornado damage that occurred in the north part of our city last year.  Believe it or not, most of the kids hadn't seen the damage even though it is in our own city.