Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Habitats Lesson Four

We started the lesson with this voice thread after explaining...

.... "I am the Arctic King and am throwing a party. You will choose one of 16 different animals. You must become that animal and approach my throne. You must tell me what you can bring to the party and if I like it, you may be allowed to enter my palace for my awesome party. If I don't like it, you must go back a try again!"   We continued to tell the class, you make take a few notes as you learn about these 16 animals that are in the Arctic Tundra Eco System so you can know what you might say to the king to get into the party!

Here is the voice thread:  https://voicethread.com/new/share/6414770/

I would have liked to include the sounds each animal makes as well during the voice thread, I added in a few at the end.

There were the pictures of each of the 16 animals on the walls spaced through out the room for them to stand under to know which animal they would like to play. We limited the groups to no bigger to four students. 

We then "played" the "Arctic King" game. Only one group "The Arctic Wolves", had to go back a try again. One of them said they would eat ME!  A few of the groups I could have sent back but I just kept asking, "Well what else can you bring to my party?"  (photos to come)

To end the class we played the "I Have... Who Has" habitats game again from the previous week.  (video to come)

Habitats Lesson Three

One week ago today, we used four learning centers (Math, Language Arts, Writing, and Art) that used habitats as the base of the information.

  • For Math it was all about the animals in the Serengeti - as well as students beginning to learn about fractions.  Click HERE to see the PIE charts we learned from. 

  • Students at the Language Arts center had to read a page of information about the Arctic Tundra to find the answers to a page of questions they had to answer.  I used TeachersPayTeachers.com to find this awesome Arctic Tundra packet of lessons and activities. 

  • For the Writing station, students went through a Power Point over view of the Desert to then write just three things they learned using a page with a picture to color at the bottom of the page of the desert. This one went so quick, so I luckily had an extra activity, I had this group sort pictures of plants and animals into labels of four different habitats: Desert, Rain-forest, Grassland, and Arctic Tundra. (many thanks my fellow Elementary Education colleague for letting me borrow her beautiful presentation)


After everyone had finished their first center, we took a quick break to "play" short game and talk about acting. I reminded the class as actors, we add information to a scene typically in three ways:  VERBALLY (by talking, the lines of our character), EMOTIONALLY, and SPACE WORK (the props we use and how we interact in the space on stage or on the movie set).  I taught them briefly about "Life Coming In" and that the characters we play in a performance don't just magically appear as they make an entrance but something happened just before they enter and sometimes maybe years ago something had happened that is still influencing that character's life and behavior and view points (opinions) in that very scene. I asked them to each make an emotional choice and have a "back story" about the card they had to play the "I Have... Who Has" game with a Habitat Theme. I wrote "Happy, Sad, Fearful, Angry, and Loving" on the board to remind them of some powerful emotions for some suggestions.   This was a huge hit and the class wanted to play it again immediately once we were done.  They would have to wait a week to have another go at it as we played it again today.

Once we finished all our centers, we then played a final game to end the class called "Barn Yard". 


There are 3 animals from each of the Serengeti, the Desert, and Arctic Tundra. All the animals make distinct sounds. 

We printed just 3 copies of this page. 

Each person is given the name of an animal with 2 other people having the same animal. We spread across the room. No one was allowed to tell which animal he was. At the signal each person made the noise of the animal and moved like the animal that he had been given. When we found all of our animals in your group and we sat down until everyone found their group.


Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Habitats Lesson Two

Went to Foothills Elementary on Friday afternoon 12/12/14.  Lesson objective: to be able to sort organisms that use different types of camouflage.

Because we had the gym for a limited time, we did the lesson a little out of order. We played some theater games after reading through this awesome lesson that is on-line. Much of it was review but there were also some new vocabulary and content to enhance what we learned on my first visit.

In the gym we did a mirroring exercise with music. I told them one of the four categories of camouflage is MIMICRY where animals will look like something else that is poisonous, dangerous or tastes bad to avoid being prey to other animals.





Then we did a theater experience where we were FLOCKING to music. Click HERE to see the video I took of our flocking. I think Mrs. Webster's video will be better and will post it soon. Before we began, I told them for those that are leading, be willing to fall back and allow someone else to have a turn to lead. After the song I taught them that in acting (especially improv) you need to "feel" when it's your turn to lead and when it's time to follow. There must be "give and take" and when it's your turn to take - TAKE IT! but when it's time to give, be willing to give. Often you must just "feel" this and trust your partners on stage.

We then played a game of tag where those that were "it" were "predators" and those trying not to be tagged were "prey".   To become "camouflaged" a "prey" just had to stand on one foot with arms out stretched. But you could only stay like that for 5 seconds. I forgot to tell the "predators" that there is "no guarding" allowed and it looks like a future lesson (around Valentine's Day) will be about RESPECT and KINDNESS.  :-)

Back in the classroom we very quickly (too quickly) went through this power point I put together to learn about the four different types of CAMOUFLAGE. We then used three different versions of a quiz to see if they could identify each of the four different kinds of camouflage. Here is a link to the a PDF that includes all three (3) quiz's.

The kids really liked many of the photos the animals in the Power Point.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Habitats Lesson One

Expectations for behavior: 
If I raise my hand when I ask a question, I want you to raise your hand and I’ll call on you. If I say “everyone” at the end of question, I want you to all call out the answer.

Objective: At the end of the lesson you will be able to… know that just as there are different habitats, organisms are different too and can survive well or not at all depending on habitat. All students will be able to do 12 different animal walks and can differentiate between the 12 walks.


Introduction (5-7 minutes):
  1. Attitude Orientation: Ask, “What is a habitat?” and then show definition slide, that states "a. Place and conditions in which an organism lives. b. Made up of the physical properties of the environment and the relationship to other organisms in the environment." Ask, “What are the KEY WORDS in this definition?” Be sure they are clear on what an “organism” is. 
  2. Schema Orientation:  Show slide with the 4 different photos of “Examples of Habitat” as well as the “Microhabitat” slide explaining there are sometimes smaller habitats found inside large ones. 
  3. Activity Orientation:  Final two slides of power point are:  “TRUE or FALSE: For any particular environment, some types of plants and animals survive well, some survive less well and some cannot survive at all.” And then just simply “TRUE”  Go back to side of four (4) habitats and explain that just as an Arctic Fox that thrives in the tundra would die in the desert – also if we took a lizard or a snake from the desert and put it in the tundra, they too would die.  
State, "because animals are different and survive well or not at all in the many different habitats, we are going to have some fun and learn a few different "animal walks" that represent 12 different animals." 

Activity
In a large space (gym or M.P.R.) where the class can move about, demonstrate each of the *12 animal walks. Explain that everyone will need to be able to do these walks in a manner that anyone would be able to differentiate between which animal is being represented.  Ask “What does the word DIFFERENTIATE mean?”  Stating that although the kangaroo, frog and rabbit are all animals that jump, actually modeling how the Kangaroo Jump, Frog Jump, and Rabbit Jump, are quite different. You can see here, when they incorrectly guessed "frog" for the Rabbit Jump, this was a great time to show them how the Frog Jump is different. 


Demonstrating 12 different animal walks can be a lot, so to make it more interesting and playful, it can work to have just have a few students demonstrate each walk with you and have the rest of the class try to guess each animal.  Also gauging the class to see if everyone is staying engaged, once in a while maybe have the whole class “practice” a few of the walks is good.

After teaching them the walks and placing the ANIMAL SIGNS (each sign has 3 of the 12 different animals) onto the orange cones placed at the four “corners” of the “running track” – explain that while the music plays they will be either walking, running, sliding, galloping, skipping, or leaping around the orange cones. Then when the music stops, pick one of the three animals on the orange cone closest to you.


*Kangaroo Jump, Frog Jump, Rabbit Jump, Elephant Walk, Bear Walk, Gorilla Walk, Puppy Dog Walk, Alligator Walk, Seal Walk, Inch Worm Crawl, Crab Walk, Wounded Coyote Walk 

Assessment:
Have them get into groups of 3 or 4 for each student to take a turn to demonstrate 2 different animal walks to get their classmates to guess the animal - reminding them to perform in such a way to "differentiate" each walk.  

After returning to class, have them write in writing journal why they feel different animals survive well or not at all depending on the habitat. (at the start of my next visit, I will have them do this assessment to both review and check to see if they remember what we learned.)

Our next lesson will be about how some animals use camouflage to survive! 

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Looking forward to being at Foothills Elementary School this year.

foothills

I'm excited to learn today that I'll be working with Jackie Webster's third grade class up at Foothills Elementary School and my faculty mentor here at Brigham Young University - Teresa Love! Awesome!