Category Archives: 5th

VoiceThread

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One of my favorite Web 2.0 tools is VoiceThread!  I have used it in several classrooms to get the students communicating about the things they are learning in class.  The first step is to build avatars for your children so that their actual pictures are not out on the internet.  There are several great sites for creating your avatar, such as buildyourwildself.com, or you can have your students draw themselves in Pixie.  Then you can use these pictures to add identities on your page.  You only have to create the identities once and they will be on your account forever, or until you delete them.

From Build Your Wild Self Avatar

Next, the teacher uploads photos or videos to their VoiceThread project.  Once the images are uploaded, you are able to share the link with your students so that they can hop on the computer and make comments.  Comments can be typed or spoken.  Both commenting options allow you to have a virtual pen, so you can draw on the page while you are talking or typing your comment.  You can set their preferences so that all comments have to be approved by the teacher before they are posted.  This is a really great way to get your students talking with their peers, other schools, other students in Virginia, students in other states, and students in other countries!  The possibilities are endless.

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.

5 Kingdoms Comic Life

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The 5th Grade students in Mr. Cabaniss’s class at Maybeury did a fantastic job showing the 5 Kingdoms of Living Things through a Comic Life.  His students were free to choose the format they thought would work best. Since we were dealing with 5 Kingdoms, most students chose a layout that had 5 spaces for their information.  I dropped photos into their classroom folder so that they could easily access them and drag them straight into the Comic Life page.  Once their pictures were in place, they added text bubbles to their pictures to explain a few characteristics of that kingdom.  This would be a great activity for the different groups of vertebrates and invertebrates as well.

From 5 Kingdoms Comic Life

5th Grade Debate Blog

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The 5th Grade students in Mrs. Nowicki’s class at Springfield Park wanted to talk with other students within the county to get their opinions on cell phone usage by kids and school uniform policies.  In their research, the students discovered that Laburnum Elementary has a school uniform policy in place, so we asked the 5th grade teachers at Laburnum if they would be interested in blogging with us.  They agreed, so the Springfield Park students came up with the questions they wanted to ask on each topic.  Then Mrs. Grubbs, the school librarian, created a blog through blogs.henrico.k12.va.us so that the students at Springfield Park could communicate with students at Laburnum.  The Springfield Park students really enjoyed seeing and responding to the comments made by their peers at another Henrico County school.

Blogs are a great way to take your students ideas outside of the walls of the classroom and even the school.  Some teachers even have their students blogging with kids at schools in different states…and countries!  Sign up for a consultation if you would like to learn how to create a blog for your students through blogs.henrico.

5th Grade Numbers Lesson

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The 5th Grade scientists in Mr. Cabaniss’s class at Maybeury are preparing for an awesome project that they will be working on this year.  Their project involves raising trout from the egg stage to the fingerling stage.  Once the trout are at the fingerling stage, they can be released into Virginia’s riverways.  Throughout this experience, the students will be keeping track of the water chemistry in the fish tank and tracking the fish growth.  To keep up with all of this data, the students will be using Numbers to plot data and create graphs.

In our lesson, we practiced graphing data.  We went to weather.com to pull up the 10 day forecast in their zip code to use as our data set.  The students had to input their data into the cells.  Then we highlighted the data and inserted a graph.  We created both a bar graph and a line graph to see which one would be the best to display our data.  We also added a title and manipulated the features on the x-axis and y-axis.  The students are now prepared to graph their trout data in the coming weeks.  Nice job 5th Grade Scientists!!

From Graphing in Numbers

5th Grade ProScope Lesson @ Maybeury

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The 5th Grade students in Mrs. Dingas’s class at Maybeury Elementary used the ProScopes to take awesome pictures of the 3 types of rocks–Igneous, Sedimentary, & Metamorphic. Students took pictures of various rocks and saved them to their student folders. Next, the students will put these images into a Keynote describing characteristics of the different types of rocks. Check back soon for the finished Keynotes!

From Rock Types