#Kahoot #STEM

Got to chat w/ @KahootSteph at their office in London. It was 5:30pm there, so we got to say hi to the Kahoot Founders & engineers as they were leaving work for the day. Really amazing to see the TEAM behind this great product!

We played a Kahoot! asking us some London Trivia. 

We learned the currency there is called the "Pound", the queen is "Elizabeth" and the big clock tower is NOT the Tower of London, but is called "BIG BEN" after the Bell inside. 

A big Thank you to Steph for being such a terrific tour guide! 

Steph talked to us about the importance of Coding and how its important to learn this skill if you want to create a cool app like Kahoot. The founders wanted to #MakeLearningAwesome and they have succeeded! 

We have loved having Kahoot in our classroom this year. It has been such a great constant formative assessment. It really helped cement them learning the associative, distributive, and commutative properties in Math, Jumbles for spelling, Battle of the book novel reviews... Really can be used for anything!

This chat was a great look behind the scenes and helped the kids understand that websites/games are made by people and if they want to, they can learn how to do it too!

#elemmathchat @bloxelsbuilder

Hand-on math just makes the concepts jump off the page.

This was how the book was teaching volume... Explain which cooler has greater capacity? (It is tall and fatter) I feel like if you ask a dumb question, you'll get a dumb answer. Questions really need to be framed better to provide Depth of Knowledge. http://alicekeeler.com/2015/09/27/dokchat-dok-is-hard-lets-talk-about-it/

 I supplemented, by having the kids each pick a big item and a small item and then estimate how many times the smaller item would fit into the larger item to illustrate this concept. It was a lot more engaging.

It also did this unit on weight where it showed 2 pictures of things where students had to guess if it was closer to 10g or 10kg. So, I borrowed scales from the classroom next door. I had them do the same thing, but with 6 objects from around the classroom. 

Our last unit is on area/perimeter. We were exploring the concept of squares & rectangles and how they could have the same area, but the perimeter was smaller the more square-like it was. To illustrate this concept, they had to make 3 different castles out of 16 yellow blocks. They then had to make a moat (perimeter) out of 16 blue blocks. 

They used a combo of either the boxel app, bloxel board, or just the regular classroom tiles. 

We discovered that the long skinny castle, or the slightly rectangular castle design would not work, but the more square one could! 

Scientific Method

Patience: I am amazed at the level of patience my students have. We have been practicing the scientific method in preparation for the science fair. I did a simple experiment asking "How fast does snow melt?" 

We each got a little cup of snow and we set them out on the table. My initial plan was to move on with a math lesson while they melted in the background, but my students wanted to watch the cups melt. 

Some turned clear as they melted. Some had lots of water while they melted. Some just shrank. They were excited by every little change. 

We talked about how it was important that we didn't hold the cups because it would be "cheating" as the heat from our hands would melt it faster. We wondered why they were melting differently: some snow had come from the top layers and other from the bottom layers. 

Yup. 26 minutes we sat and watched snow melt. These kids are seriously extraordinary!

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So... It should not come to my surprise that for the science fair, one group decided they wanted to see if glue dried faster on paper or on a pencil.... 

They hypothesized it would be faster on the pencil because since they hold the pencil, it would be warmer and the glue would dry faster. Sound logic to me! 

#PBL

 This is how we do field trips in the Arctic: Snowmachine & Sled

 I realized that one thing I love about the students here is that they are so patient. When our ipads are slowly loading, they dont get frustrated: They know how to wait. I realized its because they go on these long journeys into the woods with nothing but their thoughts. They appreciate the simple things.

We found the top of a musk rat house and dug to set a trap in it

The next day, the 4/5 Grade checked it and they caught one. I'm kind of glad I didn't see that part. 

It was cold and they got sprayed with snow/mud, but these kids were tough. I did not hear any complaints. 

Learning about Egyptian Egypt via @Skypeclassroom

My students interacted with someone in Egypt today. EGYPT. We found it on the globe, it was literally on the other side of the world from us. ("Egypt is in Africa?!?") It was 10pm there and noon here. They had just finished their celebration. 

The students noticed her accent and asked how to say Thank You "Shukran" and "Your Welcome" "Ahlan Wasahlan" 

 They also shared showed her pictures of the snow here and got to talk to our host's 11 year old daughter. They had the same favorite subject in School: PE. So amazing to connect these two vastly different worlds!

#Easter Eggs + Igloos = Egg-loos!

Such a fun #STEM activity... Seriously, Science/Technology/Engineering/Math all in one... Plus they had to work in groups so it fostered communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creation, and creativity! 

They started their igloos base by making little bricks from cups. 

As the igloos got bigger, having made the bricks level and smooth became important 

Then they got creative using rocks, sticks, and branches to stylize their creations. 

They wondered how to make the top and learned to reinforce the sides and slowly tilt the higher bricks in to make it smaller. Some groups elected to make flat roofs by smooshing flat pieces. One group decided to just use the tree branches for the roof. 

Documented it using ipads

@skypeclassroom visit with @MarkC_Author

Hearing real stories of #growthmindset in action is amazing. My students loved how he shared that he had multiple failures on his path to success and I loved the idea that failure just means you haven't found your right path yet...

He also shared some AMAZING tips about self-publishing through Amazon. After his book began to sell, publishers & agents began to seek him out instead of getting lots of rejections when he was seeking out publishers & agents. When you do what you love, people will find you!

http://markcheverton.com/share-your-minecraft-images/

My students have been determined to write a 24 page story so that they can put it on amazon and order a real copy of it. This is such a great thing that every teacher should be utilizing!

#Easter Egg Baby Project

One of my students saw an episode of "Everyone Hates Chris" where he had to take care of an egg baby and asked if we could do it in class. YES!

Some kids in the 4/5 class loved the idea and wanted to do it too and it spread... That's the awesome thing about ideas, a good idea is contagious. 

They started preparing by making cots for their babies, which was a good idea because since the class is two sets of twins, a lot of the students decided that they wanted to have twin baby eggs. One of the boys even wanted quadruplets.

Reading a story on Epic! to his Quadruplets

The twins in their bunkbed

They even brought their babies to Language class with us & the teacher humored them by asking them "Shoori Oozhi?" (What their name was) 

It was fun as we named their babies, we used babble.com to look up what certain names mean. One of our student's name meant "from the big town" lol

Keep Calm & Carry On..

It started when one of my students found a: Keep Calm & Vote for Hunter gif on the internet and wanted to print it out for his future campaign. (Apparently there is dissent against current class the current class president) Its interesting because this is apparently a World War II era meme and we are currently reading "Number the Stars" 

I found a link where they could generate their own version of the meme. (http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/) A student made these posters for her Easter Egg Babies: 

And a get well card for our classmate, who got med-evaced after a snow-go accident...

And when they found out that you could make a graphic of anything. One of my students made this, which was inspired by our skype with Author: Mark Cheverton. 

They are 21st Century Kids and this is a 21st century classroom... I'm glad it gets them reading, writing, and designing! 

6 week countdown...

I'm not counting the days till summer, instead I'm counting down the days I have left in the classroom. I had mentioned before that I was ready to leave the classroom and now, I have a clearer picture of what the next year will be like...

We started our sunflower seeds from our penpals in Kansas this week... And now, Looking forward to fun Earth Day with Lots of Outdoor activities, teaching the students about Thailand, having both a Star Wars Day & Cinco de Mayo celebration in the same week, just ordered my caterpillars from Insect Lore... and looking forward to the school's yearly Culture Week.

So the time that I do have left, I want to make the most of. One thing that I tried was a movie day at the end of the week. This was a positive reward for the students for having a good attitude during testing. We watched Moana and I put the subtitles on. It was a joy to watch them read & sing the movie. Even the boys got quite into the singing with the hand raising! They were actually reading: "What does excuse mean?" "I didn't know design was spelled like that" "It says squealing" (I put the hearing impaired captions on)

That song "How far will I go" will forever remind me of these guys...

6 weeks left.. I'm going to miss it.