October Teaching Ideas

Here are some more teaching ideas

Do you find that your greatest ideas come to you when you do not have a pencil and paper around! And my notepad on my phone is full, I guess I need to start carrying around a notebook and pencil!

In Science we were learning about adaptations. So I came up with this project of adapting animals in 10 million years. Here, she adapted a panda. They had a lot of fun making the animals, the room was a crafty mess, but the kids were really good at cleaning up after each day!

The kids loved these, all I did was put a piece of paper in a page protector and they were able to complete problems with dry erase markers!

Learning about 3D figures, I had all the kids bring in boxes (which then helped with making the adaptation animals) and they had to count edges, vertices  and faces. I encouraged them to bring in boxes of different sizes, and shapes.

So, a little back story before you read the next picture. We were learning about how DNA copies itself. A mini lesson with DNA for ya, A and T bases form together, and C and G form together, so when DNA separates down the middle A will always pair up with T and has no chance to pair up with C or G. The bases are like "puzzle pieces"  SO when I was teaching I told the students that when the DNA "unzipped" itself there were "free floating" bases in the cytoplasm drinking Diet Coke and eating M&M's waiting to get paired up. I was trying to give them a "visual" and they must have remembered it, look what they wrote for the essay portion on the test. I will not disclose the name! :)

oh kids remember the darnest things..

This lab is called Birds of Prey, they had to use tweezers to act as their beaks and pick up the "moths". They had to pick up orange, black, white, and newspaper moths and make observations of which were the easiest to pick up! 

Another lab was to cut a butterfly out of a magazine and hide them around the room and outside! A lot of the students found some really neat places!

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Here is a lab where the kids can learn about how animals have adapted over time. The students were given an envelope and I gave them different supplies, and they had to adapt their beak to pick up bugs of the air (popcorn) worms from the ground (gummy worms) and fish of the sea (raisins)

I try and do a "themed" bulletin board for at least one of the lessons I am teaching. This is for transformations in math, the students had to complete a "gallery walk", sketch and label what type of transformation happened! I used real-world examples (reflections in water, plants, and letters) along with math examples.

A student came up to me and said "Miss Koch, you can put up a flower and all the petals are an example of a rotation" I need to post a couple of flowers and petals, thanks student! :)

Teaching the coordinate grid! I will post another picture in November of the FULL wall!

HERE is were I got them all!

I also found a really neat website called Math-aids that has a lot of free worksheets! 

The joys of google!

I teach the kids a new language for saying thank you each week!

Challenges

One other idea I did was a game I made up called "Challenges" I laminated 10 worksheets (I made 2 sets) and assigned a point value for each problem. They then had to record the problems they did and add up their points. I have some pretty honest kids, so they followed the rules. I had all the problems on a table and they could only have 1 worksheet at a time. I also had them work in partners. The winners got to use my desk chair for a whole day!

Have you heard of BedTime math? It is so awesome!

In a short summary, Bed Time Math is a website that has daily math problems that align with today's news stories, or interesting facts that all deal with math. I sent a calender home and I have the kids and their parents, or the kids and their siblings complete it 10 times for November. It has problems for wee ones, little ones and big ones. Sometimes if we finish math or handwriting early I will post this on the projector. The kids love it!

That's all I have for October, I have some awesome ideas for November coming up! :)
Click here for September Teaching Ideas
Click here for August Teaching Ideas

-sunshine