When I started this school year, I knew that I wanted my students to master their facts by October so that they would not struggle during the Multiplication and Division units… So I set up this bulletin board to motivate them to move their car along the Multiplication Grand Prix. I was inspired by the popular Multiplication Grand Prix game on Arcademics, but this did work to motivate most of my students to move their cars along this race track.
See images for full description of this college and career project for my 6th graders!
Ever since I was in Washington, DC, I did some type of Black History Month activity/project, and my students have always learned a lot through the process. Last year, when I taught 6th grade, I knew that I had to take this project to the next level, so I planned out how I could make this better and more relevant for them. We used plenty of apps on our iPads and got really familiar with the Google product family! I made sure that we had plenty of library books for research purposes, and we took a journey from Africa all the way to present day. Some of my students’ work is featured below.
I love making MATH relevant and finding a way to tie it into current events. Back in October, we celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month with a math review game! They learned some facts for their scavenger hunt, and they got to find math problems hidden around the classroom. I made this a little challenging for the students by using Spanish numbers around the classroom.
One aspect of the job is professional development, which can be extremely beneficial… However, it comes with the laborious task of lesson planning. When I was going to a training in California, I had to make plans for the entire week.
At the end of the school year, I like to have my students complete a research unit. Last year, we focused on HEROES! Students had to complete 3 assignments with this project: A Hero Tale, a Hero Newspaper, and a Hero Poem. My colleague and I created graphic organizers for each part of the project.
You can click the image below to enlarge.
Moving from Washington, DC to Texas was a huge transition in and of itself… But when you add the differences in the teaching content, it was even more drastic. In writing, the differences were most pronounced! In DC, our students wrote in the context of a reading passage; it was more of a response or a find details to support the conclusion that you have drawn. In Texas, on the other hand, students are asked to write about their own experiences and organize it in a one page-26-line paper. In DC, they may be given up to 4 pages to flesh out there response. You can easily see how MY mindset had to change in order to prepare my Texas students. What I relied heavily upon were graphic organizers to give students a checklist and help them remember the brainstorming and planning steps. It helped in the end because by the end of May, my students knew what elements to include in their writing to have a quality composition.
This year, I decided to spend 2 months covering black history events. We started in Africa in the 1300’s – 1500’s, and then we traveled to the United States in the time of slavery. We got through the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. We then covered the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and where we are now as it relates to equality.
Students were assigned one or two individuals to research and create a digital board as well as a tri-fold presentation board. All of the reading lessons were tied to a skill and a the week’s study. We found facts and opinions in a newspaper from the time of slavery. We compared and contrasted kings and queens in Africa. We looked at the elements of drama through a play that focused on the Greensboro sit ins. We planned out a new Civil Rights Museum using area and perimeter concepts. We converted fractions to decimals and found equivalent fractions for our Black History Timeline. The students absolutely LOVED this unit, and it was a joy to be able to help them learn about a part of our country’s history that is all too often skipped over.
The students also created an Equality Quote Quilt with famous quotes from important figures in the fight for equality.
At the end of the unit of study, I organized a commemorative Selma to Montgomery March, which was 50 years after the actual march in Alabama. In our march, 4th and 5th graders marched around the school, singing “I ain’t gon’ let nobody turn me around” in harmony. The march ended in the library with a beautiful slideshow of images from black history with “Lift Every Voice” – the National Negro Anthem – playing in the background. The students all sat quietly glued to the screen, where many of them saw these images for the first time.
I remember days later, one of the 5th grade teachers came up to me and told me that next year, we really need to plan (even earlier) to incorporate more black history into our lessons. I could not agree more!
In Texas, the teaching standards for 4th grade a mostly similar to Common Core for math, but they veer in a completely different direction with the unit on Personal Financial Literacy. I wish I had learned these skills when I was coming up, so I LOVE teaching them to my students. Well, we spent a few weeks talking about budgets, fixed expenses vs. variable expenses, income, and savings… And then I wanted the students to put these skills into action!
In this research project, students had to choose a career, find the median salary for this career, create a budget based on the median salary, find a car to purchase online, find a place to live online, and then put whatever leftover money they had towards savings. The budget was created in Excel, and there were formulas for students.
After their budget was completed, the students were ready for the real work of researching their job. Their final product was going to be made into a book, typed from Microsoft Word. To prepare for this, I created a graphic organizer (packet) that helped them find and source the information and then led them to writing each paragraph. There were sentence starters in 3 of the 6 chapters, as well as a bonus chapter for extra credit. Students were given the choice of their book design, and once they selected their design, their Word document would open, which was a book template that they were able to customize. This book has a plethora of text features, like a graph, a glossary, citations page, table of contents, section headings, italics, bold print, photographs, and captions, etc. I am excited about seeing my students’ final products!
In the meantime, here are images from my sample/example book that I shared with my students.
Also, here is a link to our project website, which has most of the resources that my students used. The graphic organizer or project summary page are not posted here.
http://monthlybudget.edublogs.org/
Last year, the school I was at had a subscription for ST Math. I am a believer in the effectiveness and usefulness of the ST Math program by Mind Research! It was not my teaching curriculum, but it was a tool in my tool belt that allowed me to give my students the time and chance to apply the skills that I taught. The program gives immediate feedback to the students and amazing visualizations of the major skills that they are expected to know. I used the following spreadsheet to track all 4th grade students at my school last year. I used the data to show me who needed more time on the program and to project where they would most likely be at the time of our high stakes testing, the DC CAS. The goal was for students to reach 75% syllabus progress in the game by the time of the test. I taught all but 11 of these students in math, and for those that needed more time on the program, I would tailor their instruction time. That being said, I would ensure that they received a math lesson each day, as well as some time to apply the new skill. Then, I would send them to the computers or iPads, and have the other students work on an advanced lesson. I would even have the students that were further along on ST Math to coach their peers, helping them think to get to the answer, rather than just telling them the answer. I would also send this spreadsheet to my colleagues each week, so that they could see who also needed more time on the computer program and allow them to log on to the program when appropriate.
This was the final ST Math wall at the end of the school year. The majority of the 4th graders had reached 100% completion. Even more exciting was the fact that all but one of the students on my roster reached 100% completion.