Our Castle Project for 2013

It's the middle of summer vacation, and I'm just getting around to writing about some of our classroom projects for the 2012-2013 school year.  So much for my pledge to be more regular in writing posts for my blog.  I do have some really good excuses, but you'll be happy that I'm not going to waste time making them.

We completed our Castle project for this year on May 1st, just in time for Core Knowledge Night.  My school is a public school and we teach all the regular school district curriculum, but we also teach much of the Core Knowledge Curriculum as well.  As part of Core Knowledge, we learn about the Middle Ages in 4th grade, and the culminating project is when my students build castles.  It is done as homework, and we do lots of writing to go with it.   We write about why castles were built. We write about the kids’ thinking and planning for their castle. Kids write a description of their work to be displayed at Core Knowledge Night. At the end we write fairy tales about what happens when an evil wizard shrinks us and our castles become real.

The kids and families never cease to amaze me with their creativity. I have seen castles made of wood, cardboard, Styrofoam, sugar cubes, marshmallows, sand (that was not such a good idea), clay, craft sticks, and rocks.  Every year, there is some new idea that I would never have thought of and have never seen before.  Last year we even had one made out of Rice Krispy Treats.

On the day the castles are due, we invite students from other grades to come see them, which is why kids come into 4th grade asking when we’re going to build castles.  I make it a point to tell families that they may assist, but it should be mostly the child’s work. When students bring their castles, we always interview them about how they planned and built their castle. When asked what they liked best about the project, many respond with something they did with their parents, so family help is an important component.

I am a big consumer of manilla folders, and I use them for this project. I staple step by step directions for the project on the left side of the folder. On the right side I include diagrams labeling the parts of the castle. We do several in-class lessons about the parts of the castle, and whether it was for offense of defense. I also include ideas about possible ways to construct a model. Most of my ideas come from the books, Knights And Castles, By Teacher Created Materials and The Middle Ages Independent Learning Unit, By Lorraine Conway.  A more complete list of the books I use for this unit are on my Medieval History for Kids post on my Prospecting for Treasure blog.

This year I moved toward having more of our resources on-line.  You can see that, along with the planning sheet and schedule we use for this project by visiting my class website at:  

http://msdays4thgrade.weebly.com/castles

If you are interested in learning more about Core Knowledge, visit the Core Knowledge Foundation Website at:  http://www.coreknowledge.org/

The Jacobson Symposium

Saturday, I attended the Jacobson Visiting Scholar Symposium at Grand View University.  This was an opportunity that was offered free of charge to area teachers.  I am so glad that I decided to go.  The keynote speaker was Dr. Laurie A. Henry from the University of Kentucky.  She talked about literacy and how that has been impacted and changed because of technology.  It was thought provoking.  I also attended one of her sessions later in the day about Literature Circles.

Later in the morning I attended Steven Hopper's  session about Social Media in the Classroom.   He is @thinkteach on Twitter.  It really inspired me to get back to using Edmodo.  If you are not familiar with Edmodo, it looks much like Facebook, except it is much safer for elementary kids.  Only people with the group code can access your posts.  I have not introduced Edmodo to this year's class at all.  In the past, I have used it to discuss books with reading groups.  I also have used it as a webquest.  Yesterday I realized that I have not tapped most of it's potential at all.  It can be a good communication tool with parents, and can be an excellent tool if you are interested in doing a flipped classroom.  It is a great way to get reluctant writers to participate in discussion and write responses.

The afternoon was set up as TeachMeet Sessions.  Sessions were short and presented by many of the participants.  This is similar to EdCamp, which I love.

I learned about QR Codes from Jen Wells.  This is something I just haven't understood in the past. I downloaded apps to my phone, while we were there, and now I'm set to go.

I was intrigued by Jeff Mullin's ideas for using music for classroom management.  I am definitely going to give this a try.  He plays certain tunes to signal transitions, or time to pass in papers.  He uses Playlist.com, which I plan to explore.

Jess Dow presented a session about Weebly.  I have a Weebly classroom website.  Sometimes I have trouble keeping it up to date.  Okay, most of the time, I have trouble keeping it up to date. I picked up some great ideas from this session about adding PDFs for spelling words, and embedding links to videos to help parents and kids with math skills, like partial product multiplication.  These ideas will make my website a much better resource for kids and parents alike.

Dr. Lindsay Grow and Jen Wells talked about Enhancing Vocabulary with Online Visual Tools.  Here are just some of the tools I plan to check out.

Graffiti Creator

Word Mover

Trading Cards

Visual Thesaurus

Tag Galaxy

Wordnik

Visuwords

Lexipedia

Grapholite

This is fun.  What do you love?

This was an awesome way to spend a Saturday with great people, inspiring ideas, and good food, in a beautiful building.  This is the first of what is to become an annual event, and I will definitely be signing up next year.

Skittles Fraction Challenge

We had a lot of fun today finding fractions of sets using Skittles.  I found a great free download on Teachers Pay Teachers for this Skittles Fraction Challenge.  It was a great way to reinforce skills we had been working on, and afterwards, the kids got to eat their math.

Bio Word Clouds

Our class has been working to better use descriptive language in our writing.  Sometimes we use worksheets to practice using adjectives, but that is often tedious, and students fail to transfer what they have learned into actual practice.  To get us started, we brainstormed words to describe ourselves.  I had students think of words that describe their appearance, words that describe their personality, words that describe their interests, and words that describe their values and beliefs  We partnered up to get feedback and advice from others.  After we had our initial lists, we worked on correcting spelling.

Using an on-line word cloud generator, we typed in our first names, and the list of words. We used Tagxedo.  From there it was a matter of selecting a layout, font, and color scheme.  We saved the finished word cloud to our computers as a jpg.  I was amazed how quickly students picked up the necessary skills. 

Our next step will be to embed them in our Kidblogs.  Then I will ask students  to write a paragraph or two describing themselves, using many of these words.

Park Your Writing Here!

Like many fourth grade classrooms, we do a lot of writing.  That writing takes many forms.  Sometimes we take our work through all the steps of the writing process.  Often we do quick writes in the form of reading response and exit slips.  I have seen several ideas for creating a parking lot for the completed writing in the form of a Ticket Out the Door or a Numbered Chart. Both of these ideas use sticky notes.  These are both a great use of sticky notes.

The downside to sticky notes is sometimes they are not that sticky and end up on the floor.  They can also be expensive, and it is very limited amount of space to write.

Then I remembered I had this pocket chart, that would let me accomplish the same thing.  Instead of numbers, I wrote student names on a label for each pocket.  For some responses, I just give students a quarter sheet of notebook paper or an index card.  In this case we did a book review about our read aloud book.  

This book review form is something I had stored away in my files.  The original form was just a word document, and I did some cut and paste to get four forms per sheet.  I ran it on colorful card stock, which is totally unnecessary, but I like color. 

The advantage of a parking lot or chart for posting ideas is that it enables students to share their ideas easily.  My students are eager to post their response.   It also lets me see at a glance who has completed the assignment.  I used the top row to post the question or topic they are responding to.  I also placed additional forms there.  

The kids like the Parking Lot so much, they were trying to fit some other work in there as well. 

If you are interested in the book review form, you can see it here.

Here is the back of the book review form. 

Once again I got the idea from Pinterest.  I have found some great writing ideas on Pinterest.  Here is a link to my Pinterest Writing Board. 

Fraction Bingo

We started working on fractions this week.  Once again I turned to my friend, Pinterest, for ideas.  I am gathering resources on this board, Fractions.  I liked the idea of creating a Fraction Bingo game, and I found this post from Primarily Speaking. Since my kids are older I decided to create a game that gave them more choices.

I created a board with figures divided into fractional parts.

They determined what fraction of the figure to color.  They cut out each square and glued it into a square on the BINGO board.  This way each student had a different board.

In order to make the game fair, I labeled a craft stick for each letter of the word Bingo.  

I also wrote each possible fraction on a square of cardstock.  Then I placed the sticks and fraction cards inside an empty oatmeal container.

It was easy to reach my hand in and pull out a stick and a fraction to call out.  I recorded the fraction called on a sheet of paper, so we could check accuracy.

Finally we tested the game by playing it.  The class gave me feedback as to what worked and what didn't.  Next time I will pull out all the fifths and sevenths, since I didn't have any on the game boards.

As we played, I realized that we can use this game again next week as we learn about equivalent fractions.  It will be easy to cover not only the fraction called, but equivalent fractions as well.

If you are interested in trying this game here is the Blank Fraction Board  and
here are the Fraction Bingo Pieces.  Please let me know if you have any difficulty accessing these.

Good Choices

It's been three months since my last blog post, but I have a good excuse.  I haven't really been at school much lately.  In fact Wednesday was my first day back to school after spending the last five weeks recovering from foot surgery.  I fractured my foot and ankle in a fall down the stairs on Christmas Day, and eventually had to have one of the broken bones repaired surgically.  For four weeks I was not allowed to put any weight on my foot, and now that I can walk, I'm still wearing the lovely black boot.

While I couldn't be at school, I kept touch with my students through letter writing and our Kidblogs.  It was a great way for us to communicate back and forth, and I have become an even bigger fan of introducing students to blogging at an early age.

Besides blogging with the kids, I spent my weeks of confinement knitting, reading, watching too much television, and exploring pins on Pinterest.  I found lots of great ideas to try out once I did get back to school.

I really liked this idea for using a hundreds chart for behavior management.  I talk with my students a lot about making good choices, so that was the title I used,  along with this quote that we all have posted in our classrooms, "Work hard, be kind, dream big!"

When the class makes good choices, draw a number from the point can.  I put the numbers from 1 to 100 on craft sticks, and put them in an old canister that I had.  When something good happens, I have a student draw a stick.  They color in the corresponding number on the hundred chart.  When we have ten in a row, we earn an extra recess or class celebration.

It's easy to set up and administer, and provides many opportunities for positive reinforcement.  I like it!  It's working well so far! The kids like being the one to draw a stick and color the chart.  As a side note, it's also a great opportunity to teach about probability.  We have control over the making good choices, but luck plays into which numbers are drawn.

It's great to be back, and this is giving us something new to work towards.