Stimulating Science Simulations

Last week it finally happened! The wireless router's were installed throughout our building. "Oh the places we can go and the thinks we can think" now! I am just giddy.  I don't even no where to start.  How about with the wireless laptop cart? First things first, a sign out calendar is a must since we share one cart with the whole school.  As soon as I made the calendar, I signed up. (of course) Now, how to put this tech to good use? We had already used it with jump drives and Vernier probes prior to going wireless. With wireless, we can make good use of Edmodo to differentiate instruction and increase independent learning. This really couldn't have come at a better time.  Fifth grade is working on 5.P.3.1 and 5.P.3.2 Since students come to my class in a team blocking schedule, investigations that take longer than 30-45 minutes to observe changes are less than ideal and we're seriously limited in the types of heat sources allowed in our elementary classro...

Some of my favorite science lessons are the ones when kids get a chance to be kids, dare I say it - like the "good 'ole days".  Today was one of those days.  Meet "Froggie". We discovered him in our student garden today. The weather was beautiful and we have been learning about weathering, erosion, and deposition.  I pulled out my popsicle sticks that are marked every cm. with a different color and used for measuring erosion on a mountain model.

We're back in school and everyone is very excited to have some new tools to use.  I'm not talking about just the typical back to school supplies.  Thanks to the career award, we have some very unique new tools to use.  One of those is the green screen and flip cams.  I've set up the green screen and we gave it a test run today.  Our topic of study is force and motion. We've been learning about Newton's laws.  After several demonstrations and some note taking, we put together a short production with our green screen technology.  It isn't the greatest quality, but I don't think it's too bad for a 1st try.  We used a free app called VideoPad and a free background to overlay on our raw video.  Here's a link to Newton's 3rd Law We'd love to hear your thoughts on this video and we can't wait to find new ways to share our learning using this technology.  Perhaps 4th grade will do a report about stalactites and stalagmites from the "Gia...