Hello?

Well...it's been a while.  I've been less than successful in my attempts to keep up with this blog.  Life just got in the way.  The school year ended, & I never even looked at this blog.  Yikes.  But!  It's a new [school] year, & I'm determined to get better at this.

Full disclosure:  I may have said this last year at this time, too.

The  new school year has started, & after 3 days, I'm exhausted!  Imagine that.  It is 90+ degrees in my classroom, so the kids & I are definitely spent by the end of the day.  We've spent the first days of this year getting to know one another & familiarizing ourselves with 6th grade policies, procedures, & general *life*.  This year I have 2 sections of 6th grade to teach, so I'll spend the morning teaching Reading, Writing, Spelling, & Social Studies.  Then we'll switch around lunch time, & I'll do it all over again with the other class.

Things are going to be a bit different this year with the hybrid new & old standards (Common Core, anyone?!), so I suspect there'll be an interesting learning curve for all of us throughout the year.  My Social Studies standards have changed considerably, too, so it's an understatement to say that I'm mildly overwhelmed.  I'm hoping to explore some new resources & adapt my way of teaching so my students are really ready to change their way thinking!  Sounds easy, right?

One really fun thing that I'm excited about for this school year?  My son (3.5 years old) will be attending the Montessori preschool in my building, so he'll be with me every morning.  I can't wait to look out my classroom window to see him playing with his classmates on the playground!

Text Features

During our Egypt unit, we spend the majority of our time on non-fiction Egyptian selections.  There are a huge number of books out there that grab kids'attention and really get them interested in the Egyptian culture.    I have about 75 of those books, and the kids love sorting through them and comparing what they've read.  This post is NOT about one of those texts :)

This post is focusing on one of those other kinds of texts-the kind that kids don't really love to read, but unfortunately does a great job of breaking down the information they need about a particular topic.  During today's class, we spent our time working in pairs with a general "Ancient Egypt" article.  The article itself was about 6 pages long, but it was interspersed with loads of pictures, graphics, sidebars, charts, and captions.  There were also several thought-provoking questions that required activating their schema, making connections to those other texts, and using the information in the article itself.

While working, to make it a little more tactile, I handed out highlighters and mini Post-It notes to each student.  They were allowed to use the highlighters to highlight important information, and use one Post-It per page to record one text feature they found.  While I use Post-Its almost daily in my room, I almost never use highlighters.  For one, they aren't allowed to use them on the state test, so I like them to be familiar with simply underlining.  But also, I find that they blatant overuse of highlighting text to be so frustrating!  They get so into using colors that they often end up highlighting the entire text...which is worse than highlighting nothing!  But, I think that every once in a while it's good, because it gets them out of a rut and lets them have a little fun, especially while reading something that can get a little monotonous.

Our text features anchor chart

My own version of a Post-It note (what else can I use my yellow dry-erase markers for?!)

 
What lessons do you create for your class to make things a little more engaging?

Apple Mummification

We are knee-deep in our Egypt unit over here in the 6th grade.  This means pyramids, pharaohs, and especially mummies.  To really emphasize the mummification process, we spend a day mummifying apples, then observe them for the rest of the week.  We take notes on the size, look, smell, and overall decay on these apples.  Each group of 4 students receives 2 apple halves, and preserves them in different substances (table, salt, epsom salts, baking soda, and combinations of each of these).  We also have one apple left alone to act as our control (for a non-science teacher, I'm proud of myself for even knowing this).

The kids really enjoy the process and get into the idea of their apple mummies.  They usually get over the "gross rotting factor" pretty quickly and do a pretty good job on their observations.

Spoiler Alert:  They all essentially decay at the same rate, no matter the substance in which they've been preserved! (Well, except for the control, of course, which was pretty disgusting by the end of the week).

What hands-on activities have been happening in your classroom?

Cast Your Vote

Election Day!  For my students, this means NO SCHOOL, as our buildings are used as polling places.  For me, it means INSERVICE DAY, where I spent my day working with my colleagues (and had a full hour to eat lunch!  at a restaurant!  with other people!).  But I digress.  The election process is one that my students still need exposure to and help wading through, especially in a presidential election year, so I planned to teach my lesson on the day before...and hope they could learn something to go home and maybe teach their someone else a thing or two.

I found a really fantastic lesson on the election process/electoral college on the blog One Hoosier Teacher.  Check it out here.  I found it a long time ago and saved it (thanks, Pinterest), knowing I'd need a great lesson for the first Tuesday in November.  I pretty much mimicked her whole lesson since it was perfect, but I did adapt a couple of things for my class.

As I began the lesson on the electoral college, I reminded my class that the electoral college is NOT a place of higher education, not a place to where they can earn a football scholarship, and certainly not a place with dorm rooms & fraternity parties :)

It's a confusing process, this electoral college, and it's one that I'd venture to say many adults don't totally understand.  I used the book Grace for President as my read aloud for the day.  The book does a decent job of explaining the electoral college in a humorous manner.

Then we viewed this infographic.  It helped the kids to see the process on the screen and actually be able to follow it.  When I felt like we had a pretty good working knowledge of the process, we moved on to their own voting process.

I have 20 students in my morning class, and 18 in my afternoon class.  In order to reach our quota of 51 (50 states plus Washington, DC), I also asked other teachers and staff members to vote in our election.  Then I gave each student a slip of paper with his or her own state on it, and gave them a minute to find their state on the map & find their number of electoral college votes.  Some kids complained about their low number, but that made me feel like they really did understand the process.

After they established their numbers, I dangled the carrot.  I told the students they'd be voting...not for Romney or Obama, but for Coke or Pepsi.  They had a minute or two to decide which soda they wanted to vote for, then I opened the polls.  They brought their state slips to the table, deposited them in the ballot box, and chose their soda.

Then we voted on the site 270towin.  My class really liked this part, and waited with anticipation to see whether the state would turn red (Coke) or blue (Pepsi).

In the end, it was a landslide.  Coke won, 323 to 209.  For those of you counting, no, that doesn't add up to 538.  I had one student who opted out of voting, claiming she didn't like Coke or Pepsi (can you imagine?!).  I used it as a semi-teachable moment...pointing out that lots of times, people opt out of voting, and even though it's your civic duty, I certainly couldn't force anyone to cast a vote.  But I also pointed out that even as one person opts to not vote, the entire state of Nevada would not ever really opt out, so those 6 electoral college votes would actually be counted in a real election.

I think the kids really enjoyed the lesson, and not just because they ended up with a can of pop.  (Yes, I know I've called it both soda and pop in this post.  What can I say-I grew up in Buffalo, NY, but live in Cincinnati, OH.  I haven't fully converted to the dark side!)