Category Archives: 4th

Review Using ActiVotes & QUIA

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As the benchmark testing is quickly approaching, many teachers are asking for fun activities they can do with their kids to review.  I really like the idea of using the ActiVotes because the students tend to be more engaged and excited about review whenever the ActiVotes are in the room.  My students always loved using my Quia website too, so why not put the two together? In this review lesson, I projected the teachers Quia site with a rags to riches activity on 2nd Grade map skills.  Rags to Riches is similar to “Who wants to be a millionaire” so they kids get excited that they are earning pretend money as they answer the questions correctly.  You can also change the currency.  In this activity, they were trying to win a million Skittles rather than dollars.

From QUIA Review Game

All teachers in Henrico have access to a Quia site.   Quia is a nice  option for review because you can create your own activities with the specific questions that you want your students to know the answers to.  You can also borrow activities from others if you find a great Quia activity that you like on other persons page.   If you love their activity, but there is a question or two that you dislike, you can always edit the other persons work and make it fit your needs.  If you would like help setting one up for your classroom, please sign up for a consultation.

4th Grade Food Chain Activity

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The 4th grade student’s in Ms. Edgerton’s class at Baker have been studying food chains/webs.  As a research activity, each student was assigned a different habitat (grasslands, ocean, desert, etc.)  The librarian pulled some books and web resources to help them find the information they needed on food chains in that habitat.  While researching, the student’s used this pre-created template on Pixie to plan out their ideas:

Once their planning sheet was completed, the student were asked to open up the Pixie slide of their habitat.  The teacher and I had already created Pixie slides in which we inserted a picture of each habitat and glued it to the background.  Then when the students added their pictures, arrows, and text, it would show up right on top of the habitat photo.  In Pixie, the students clicked on stickers and searched for the name of the animal, plant, or decomposer they were looking for.  Pixie searches the clip art folder, pics4learning, and iPhoto to find pictures for the students.  By clicking and dragging they can easily add the living things to their slide.  The shape tool allows them to draw arrows to show the flow of energy through the food chain/web.  Here’s an example of the finished product:

4th Grade Studies Famous Artists

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The 4th grade students at Springfield Park Elementary have been studying famous artists in art class with Mrs. Cogbill.  She split the students into 6 different groups, and each group was assigned a different artist.  For this project she focused on Monet, Da Vinci, Seurat, Degas, O’Keefe, and Van Gogh.  The students spent one class period researching and completing this graphic organizer created in Kidspiration.

When students came back for the next lesson, they used their graphic organizer to create a Comic Life about their artist.  Mrs. Cogbill modeled how to organize the research into a Comic Life document.  She also touched on the 4th grade writing SOL’s by asking the students to insert speech/thought bubbles and text boxes that would both inform their peers about who the artist is, and also to persuade others to take a look at the art work created by this artist.  Her students really enjoyed working on this project because they were able to share their research in a creative way.

To insert pictures into Comic Life, the students practiced with working out of 2 different windows.  Mrs. Cogbill and I dropped photos and clip art into the students classroom folder on Volume 2, so students had to open this folder and drag the photos into Comic Life.  They also played with the capture feature on Comic Life and took a photo of themselves to insert into the first box on their comic.