STEM: 3D shapes

With common core came many new things.  One of them being STEM.  Which I have completely fallen in love with.  I love the fact that students get to use what they know to solve real problem.

We just finished our unit on 3D shapes and decided to do a STEM activity to tie everything together.  During the unit we talked about cones, cylinders, rectangular prisms, cubes, and pyramids.   We describe each shape and compared the faces and vertices.  They had a very good understanding of what 3D shapes were.

To start our STEM project we read Jack's House by Karen Magnuson Beil and pointed out that builders use 3D shapes when they build homes. There task was going to be to build a house out of spaghetti and marshmallows that a small doll could live inside. We then demonstrated how they could use the spaghetti as the edges and the marshmallows as the vertices. 
After answering a couple questios about how many people in a group and where could they go we let them go.  Each group was made up of 2 or 3 students of their choice.  We gave each group a handful of spaghetti and marshmallows and let them explore.  It took many tires but eventually they got.  Here are some pictures of what they came up with.

When everyone was done they had to show the class the house that they built and tell what 3D shapes they used.  They had so much fun and still talk about all the shapes they can make.  What STEM projects have you done in your class?

Daily 5: Listen to Read

Well considering Sandy has hit Maryland full force we did not have school today and we won't be going tomorrow. Who knows about the rest of the week. No school is probably a good thing considering I my kiddos have given me a horrible cold. :-(

Like many others I started using Daily 5 in my classroom this year. I have to say that I love Daily 5!!! Not only do I love it but my kiddos love it too. They count down the minutes until it is time to do Daily 5. Then when it is time to clean up they all start to whine. Out of all the Daily 5 components the one they like the best is Listen to Read.  In my class we have 3 iPods (don't get too excited they are  my old ones) that I have loaded all my books on tape on to.  I also have 2 computers that we use for Listen to Read. Because our school system has put tight restrictions on what we can view at school my teaching buddy and I were having a hard time finding sites that would read books to students and access them at school. A fellow teacher told us that you can download you tube videos and our minds went to work.  We figured out that you tube had hundreds of children's books read by adults and fellow children.  We used savevid.com to download the books we wanted and then put them into a Smartboard file. We open these files at school and we have instant listen to read centers. My only wish now is that I had more computers.  They are easy to manage and the kids love that the pictures move.

Down on the Farm

Here are a few things we did this week...

Our favorite book this week had to have been Mrs. Wishy Washy.  After reading the story we made mud.  Students loved putting their hands in the mud, well some of them did others just thought it was gross.  After we were done playing we made a "mud" map (our version of a bubble map).  My kiddos did a great job.  We then we used our "mud" map to write a mud poem.  We decorated the poem with the face of Mrs. Wishy Washy.

I just had to make this cow and my wonderful high school intern helped me with the pig.  The kids were so excited to get back from music and see a huge cow on the back wall. 

Another favorite book was The Cow that Said Oink.  My kids laughed all the way through this books.  They thought it was so funny that a cow would say "oink" and a pig would say "moo".  After reading the story we wrote descriptive words on post it notes and stuck them all over the cow. 

Music and poems are a big part of my classroom.  This week my kids loved listen to Jack Hartmann's Party on the Farm song.  They also loved these interactive poems.

What a great week!!! This has been one of my favorite units so far this year. Monday we are off to the pumpkin patch. 

Read for the Record-Ladybug Day

Thursday October 4th was Read for the Record Day.  This year we read Ladybug Girl and the Bug Squad.  My students had so much fun learning about Ladybugs.  We started our day out by making Ladybug Glyphs.  Students answered questions about themselves to make their own ladybugs.  It is amazing what they learned about each other.

Our reading specialist came into read Ladybug Girl and the Bug Squad to us.  While she was reading some of my wonderful parent volunteers helped me dye frosting red for our ladybug cookies.  Students decorated sugar cookies to look like ladybugs.  They loved licking the extra frosting off of the spoons.  We even added Hershey drops for ladybug spots. 

During science we created a KWL about ladybugs.  I was very impressed with everything they knew and everything they remembered from our story.

A class favorite was making their own ladybug hats.  Students loved making these and wore them all day.


We had tons of fun and can't wait to see what next years book will be.  Here is a cute ladybug sight word book you can download and share with your class.