Wax Museum

A fifth grade project at my school is a Christian hero biography/wax museum project. Each student:

• reads a Christian hero biography
• takes notes while reading
• types notes (must have sections are: family, language, compare/contrast, timeline with 10 events, events/travels, accomplishments, obstacles, and a Bible verse)
• displays notes on a trifold board
• writes and memorizes a two minute (give or take) script 

As you can tell, it is a big project. It took a lot of time, but I am so proud of how it turned out. It was fun seeing the final product of their hard work.

We are wrapping up our Great Depression unit this coming week. I integrated a lot during this unit and the students have learned so much about this era. At the beginning of the unit, I created this little area to display books related to the Great Depression and to gain student interest.

I did a book talk about the chapter books shown below. We did a book raffle afterwards and EVERY single book was checked out! LOVE! 

One of the resources we used during the unit was this USA Studies Weekly newspaper.

I love to read picture books and this book did not disappoint! 

In Writing, we wrote about the Great Depression in our Family Message Journals. This student did SUCH a good job!

Literacy & Social Studies

Happy Sunday! I'm popping in real quick to share what we have been doing this past week in Literacy & Social Studies. 

 

In Literacy, we are working on our biggest project of the year: our wax museum. This is my first time doing it since I am new to the school, but it is going great! Each student read a Christian hero biography and took notes about their hero. Then, they typed their information, printed it, cut and pasted it onto construction, and created their trifold. Finally, every student wrote a 2 minute (give or take) script for the wax museum. It has been a LOT of work. I can't wait to see the final product. My students have worked so hard. We have dress rehearsal this Thursday and the wax museum this Friday.

 

Here is a sneak peek at two trifolds of Corrie Ten Boom.

In Social Studies we began our unit on the Great Depression. We have learned all about the stock market crash of 1929 and how it affected people during that time period. My students seem to really enjoy history and I love that.

 

 

To review for the test, I created a review game on Kahoot. I know the kids will love playing it! The only negative to Kahoot is that you have a limited number of words/spaces you can use for the questions and answers.

 

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday and have a wonderful week! 

Book Review: Christmas in America

I was recently contacted to do a book review of the picture book Christmas in America by Callista Gingrich, illustrated by Susan Arciero.



I really liked Christmas in America. In the story, Ellis the elephant travels back in time page by page and learns about Christmas in America at various stages of American history. It touches on:

• settler in Jamestown
• the colonists in Williamsburg, Virginia
• American Revolution - crossing the Delaware River
• George and Martha Washington at Mount Vernon
• Lewis and Clark expedition
• Andrew Jackson at the White House
• Civil War soldiers on the battlefield
• pioneers traveling along the frontier
• Teddy Roosevelt and his wide, Edith, at the White House
• World War I troops overseas
• Calvin Coolidge as he lights the first national Christmas tree
• 1920's, Great Depression
• World War II
• Apollo 8 astronauts as they orbit the moon

Being a Literacy and Social Studies teacher, I LOVE the integration this book provides. When I taught 4th grade in South Carolina, I taught everything from early colonists to Civil War. Now that I am teaching 5th grade, I teach the latter events. This book will be GREAT to use in the classroom this Christmas. It'll be great to review previously learned topics and a good sneak peek for future units.

I also love that this book talks about God in a few places throughout the text. On the page about the pioneers it states, "They spoke of an infant, so tender and mild, born in a manger, the holy Christ child." I love being able to share my faith with my students and I love that the author chose to put that in the book.

Here are some photos of several of the pages throughout the book.

 I would definitely recommend Christmas in America.

Assembly line - candy cars

In Social Studies we have been learning about the assembly line and how Henry Ford manufactured the Model T using the assembly line. Our Social Studies textbook (Heritage Studies) had a wonderful assembly line activity.

I gathered all of the materials into baskets for each group.

I purchased plastic tablecloths to cover my desks, which made clean up super easy!

The assembly line steps are outlined below. You can change this into less steps to accommodate the number of students in your group. I had two classes and both have 16 students. I had two groups of eight students.  Some of the jobs below could be combined.

*I would recommend trying glue adhesive dots instead of liquid glue. It was a bit of a mess so we used tape and it worked out okay. I think glue dots may work better, though.

Before we began we reviewed what an assembly line is and how everyone will have one job that they would repeat multiple times.

 I heard some of the funniest and best comments after this lesson. One student said, "Henry Ford would have totally fired us.". Another said as he was leaving, "This was so much fun!". LOVE! Each student went home with this baggie with their candy car.

Weekly Recap

Last week in Reading, we focused on asking questions. We talked about how good readers ask questions before, during, and after reading. We also talked about WHY we do that and how it helps us become better readers. We wrapped up our fantasy genre unit and finished our read aloud of The Magician's Nephew.

I first modeled this skill with a mini lesson using the picture book Fly Away Home. As a class, we came up with questions before reading, during reading, and after reading.

We practiced this skill all week. Sometimes we used other picture books and sometimes we used our read aloud, The Magician's Nephew.

The Stranger is a great mentor text to use with this strategy.

In Social Studies, we began our study of early transportation. We focused of Henry Ford, the Model T, and Ford's use of the assembly line. We have a FUN assembly line activity tomorrow that I'll blog about later this week.

We started reading aloud Who Was Henry Ford? while we are studying about him. 

We watched this 5 minute video of the Model T. It was good for the kids to see an assembly line. We talked about other places we've seen assembly lines.

 We also celebrated my birthday! I was showered with kids words, sweet homemade cards, gifts, and more!

Literacy & Social Studies

Happy Saturday! I have had good intentions on posting throughout the week, but it hasn't happened yet. I am sure I'll get into a better rhythm soon!

This week in Social Studies, we have continued our map skills unit. We used these raised relief maps, flat maps, and globes to identify natural features.

We reviewed the terms equator, prime meridian, latitude, and longitude. We used THIS ACTIVITY to identify points on a map using latitude and longitude.

In Literacy, we began our fantasy genre unit. We started off by creating an anchor chart with the elements of fantasy. Interesting tidbit: Fifth graders at my school are required to write in cursive on assignments. So, you'll see a lot of cursive in our anchor charts. 

Our first reading skill we covered was predicting and that went along great with our fantasy read aloud, The Magician's Nephew. The first few chapters are great to use for making predictions. 

We kept track of our predictions with this chart in our Reading binder.

We are ready to take on week 3! 

Social Studies & Reading lessons {First Week of School}

The first week of school is down and I am ready to begin our second week tomorrow. As much as I love the back to school fun, I am ready to get into a solid routine and do what I love most --> teach my favorite subjects!

My hope is that each week I'll share what we did in Social Studies and Reading. Last week we only switched classes for two days so we only got through a small amount of content.

Let's start our recap with....

We started off very basic last week by setting up our Social Studies notebook. Our very first page is labeled, "Why is Social Studies important?". I start our notebooks off this way every year. I like to see why they think it's important to learn about the history of our country.

Our first unit is Map Skills. We began by reviewing continents and oceans. We added a map to our notebooks, labeled, and colored it.

We discussed how a map is different than a globe. We identified continents, oceans, and various features on our globes. We previewed next week's lessons by reviewing the equator and prime meridian. Since we only had two days, that is all we got to for last week.

 Moving on to....

One day we read "Have You Filled a Bucket Today?" and connected that to what we'd learn from our read aloud of "Each Kindness" from the previous day. We also connected it to our welcome back assembly, where our principal talked about how God wants us to treats others and how we treat others shows our love for him.

I shared with my students that one of my favorite authors is Patricia Polacco. We read "Thank you, Mr. Falker" which is AMAZING. My students loved it. 

My favorite part was our BOOK FRENZY! My classes were so excited to be able to search through our classroom library and pick out a book to take home. I wish you could've seen their smiles!

Have a great week!