Digging In
Slight teacher joke there...the students are working on earth science concepts :-) Overall it was a pretty good week other than a bump in the road on Tuesday morning due to a student behavior issue, but with some reflecting and a little one-on-one time, we were able to work through it! It was a tiring week, but that may have had something to do with the Packers and Brewers having a few night games...
The 7th grade students are learning about changes to the earth's surface, so we have been looking into current events that cause changes to the earth's surface, such as flooding from hurricanes. We then connected those discussions into weathering and erosion and the small and large scale changes that can happen over time. We finished out the week (there is inservice tomorrow, so just a 4-day week!) with the start of a jigsaw activity, where the students are working in teams to take notes on particular results of weathering and erosion, and next week they will present to their classmates. I'm also looking forward to some weathering and erosion stations that we are going to be doing next week, so I'll let you know how that goes!
The 8th grade students spent the week working on a couple of projects. They have been learning about the rock cycle, and this week they worked on making models of the rock cycle. Many of the students chose to make posters, and a few of them chose to make either a digital poster or Google Slideshow/Prezi. One student is even attempting to make a physical model with actual rocks! The thing about their models is that they need to go beyond just showing the different stages of the rock cycle and what changes the rocks go through--the students need to describe what is going on at the different stages and as the rocks go through changes. I'm really looking forward to looking through the final results! The other (smaller) project we did this week was creating pet rocks :-) I included this project into the week along with the rock cycle project to add a "lighter" aspect to the intensive work the students were doing in their rock cycle work. Each student brought in a rock and some supplies to "dress it up" a little. They then created short background stories about their rocks: gave them names, talked about where they found their "pets," what they like to do. But they also needed to incorporate some of our rock cycle knowledge into the stories, such as what type of rock they thought it was, where they think their rock came from, and where they are headed. It was fun to see the kids do this project--I wasn't sure if they would get into it, but they did. They shared their rocks and stories today, and it was a good time! Next week we are going to be working on identifying different rocks and minerals, and we are going to see if we can identify what kind of rocks the pets are. We'll see how many we can get!
Mindfulness thought for the week: Blowing out someone else's candle won't make yours shine brighter.
The 7th grade students are learning about changes to the earth's surface, so we have been looking into current events that cause changes to the earth's surface, such as flooding from hurricanes. We then connected those discussions into weathering and erosion and the small and large scale changes that can happen over time. We finished out the week (there is inservice tomorrow, so just a 4-day week!) with the start of a jigsaw activity, where the students are working in teams to take notes on particular results of weathering and erosion, and next week they will present to their classmates. I'm also looking forward to some weathering and erosion stations that we are going to be doing next week, so I'll let you know how that goes!
The 8th grade students spent the week working on a couple of projects. They have been learning about the rock cycle, and this week they worked on making models of the rock cycle. Many of the students chose to make posters, and a few of them chose to make either a digital poster or Google Slideshow/Prezi. One student is even attempting to make a physical model with actual rocks! The thing about their models is that they need to go beyond just showing the different stages of the rock cycle and what changes the rocks go through--the students need to describe what is going on at the different stages and as the rocks go through changes. I'm really looking forward to looking through the final results! The other (smaller) project we did this week was creating pet rocks :-) I included this project into the week along with the rock cycle project to add a "lighter" aspect to the intensive work the students were doing in their rock cycle work. Each student brought in a rock and some supplies to "dress it up" a little. They then created short background stories about their rocks: gave them names, talked about where they found their "pets," what they like to do. But they also needed to incorporate some of our rock cycle knowledge into the stories, such as what type of rock they thought it was, where they think their rock came from, and where they are headed. It was fun to see the kids do this project--I wasn't sure if they would get into it, but they did. They shared their rocks and stories today, and it was a good time! Next week we are going to be working on identifying different rocks and minerals, and we are going to see if we can identify what kind of rocks the pets are. We'll see how many we can get!
Mindfulness thought for the week: Blowing out someone else's candle won't make yours shine brighter.
Comments
Post a Comment