Cartoons can teach...

Is too much TV bad for students…?  Well I would argue yes.  On the other hand however, if students learn to apply what they learn to some of the shows that they enjoy watching on television, some occasional time in front of the TV is not necessarily a bad thing.

While most of my inspiration for activities that I do in the classroom come from my cluttered imagination, or other elementary school teachers, as I was planning my science lessons this past week, I thought back to my high school biology and chemistry teacher.  While I didn’t always appreciate his quirky way of always making extra credit questions based on Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Monty Python (I never got any of them correct…hahaha), I will admit that he did always make learning fun!  I remember vividly, his blackboard being covered with colorful hand-drawn illustrations of sometimes-difficult scientific topics.  The illustrations most oftentimes included memorable characters from pop-culture and there was one scene that came back to me last weekend as I was planning for my week.

While I cannot remember what class it was, I remember this teacher drawing an example of Wile E. Coyote standing next to a boulder on the side of a cliff, just waiting for the roadrunner to get close enough so that he could force the boulder off the cliff and finally catch that crazy bird.  Our teacher was trying to show us the difference between potential and kinetic energy.  His drawing made us realize that while the boulder was standing at rest on the edge of the cliff, it was storing up energy (POTENTIAL ENERGY), and I remember being told that in order for the boulder to eventually have kinetic energy, it would have to be acted upon by a force in order to make it move.

Keeping in mind, the memorable science classes that I had as a high school student, I created a PowerPoint and an activity using the Looney Tunes as examples of potential and kinetic energy.  After we went through the slideshow and took notes on the new vocabulary, we watched an episode of the Roadrunner and we looked for examples of potential and kinetic energy throughout the show.  After we had shared some of our examples of energy, I gave each student some colorful printouts of various Looney Tunes examples and they had to create a cartoon scene exhibiting potential energy and a cartoon scene exhibiting kinetic energy. 

For the next few slides, see if you can decide how potential energy is being exhibited...

Roadrunner is a perfect example of kinetic energy...always on the MOVE!

Daffy Duck is saying, "I believe I can fly..."  Can anyone say SPACE JAM!  Hahahaha!

All in all, we had a lot of fun in science class this week using a movies (Star Wars PowerPoint) and TV shows as a learning tool.  Our unit on forces and motion is off to a great start, and we are all excited to learn even more!

For now… “That’s all folks!”

May the force be with you...

So, I posted on my facebook earlier, that I was actually really looking forward to starting our unit on forces and motion in science.  Since benchmark testing is over...thank goodness...we are able to start this new scientific journey tomorrow!  Introducing 5th graders to the beginning concepts of physics is not necessarily the easiest of tasks (I was NEVER a science and math person...my brother was the one who inherited that gene), but I spent the entire day today making a PowerPoint to introduce the students to Newton's Laws and the ideas surrounding forces and motion.

While we will dive into the specifics of force and motion as we go throughout the quarter, I am extremely excited to show the students my introduction PowerPoint tomorrow.  While I don't feel like trying to embed my PowerPoint into this blog, I have uploaded all of the slides so you can see.  While the multiple sound effects and musical additions to my presentation will not be able to be heard on here, you can get the idea.

After spending an entire day with Yoda, R2D2, C3PO, Chewy, and yes...even Darth Vader himself...I really just want to watch Star Wars now!

And this is how our journey will begin tomorrow morning at 8:40am, in room 15...

A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, “The Great One” was born.  Not only was he a physicist, a mathematician, a philosopher, and a theologian, but he was…as many claim…the greatest scientist ever to have lived.  They were his discoveries that led us all to an age of understanding.  Understanding of the way that the world works… 

(and yes, in my PowerPoint this introduction is crawling up the screen with the Star Wars theme playing in the background)

Yes...on this slide there is a Wookie sound in the background!

During this slide I have the "Imperial March" playing in the background.  It reminds me of my marching band days when we'd play it after the away team scored...which was all the time hahaha!

In case you have trouble, the force is FRICTION as the mom slides the sandwich across the counter.

Propaganda and the Polar Ice Plight

Right before Christmas break, we were learning about the Greenhouse Effect in Science.  Global warming is a term that many of my students admitted that they heard about frequently, but they did not necessarily know what exactly it was.  After discussing climate change during our weather unit and learning how it is impacting our earth, the students were really excited to learn more about the whole idea of global warming.  Because it was a topic that so many of my students were intrigued by, I decided to develop a plan to integrate this science content into both math and writing.

The first activity that we did was to watch a video that I found on YouTube.  The students loved the fact that the video was narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, and many of the students stated in our post-discussion that the video really made them think about the human impact on climate change and the Greenhouse Effect.  Watch the video, and decide for yourself, how it makes you feel…

After we watched the video we talked about how it could be considered a piece of propaganda.  We discussed how propaganda is when someone tries to manipulate public opinion. After discussing how media that can reach a wide audience is usually used in order to publish propaganda, we talked about how the Coca Cola company was using their trademark polar bears in order to support saving the real polar bears that are being affected by melting polar ice.  When we had discussed how Coca Cola had used their popular name as a platform for change, I asked the students to think of other living things that have been impacted by global warming, and make their own soda can (just like the holiday Coca Cola can) that would benefit their cause.  They had to make their own “Pop Propaganda”.

After students had completed their propaganda writing project, I also had students work with data concerning melting polar ice in math class.  I divided the students into groups and each group had data that tracked the amount of polar ice in the Northern Hemisphere over the last 110 years.  One day, they had to complete a bar graph for their data, the next day they had to design a line graph, and the last day before Christmas break they had to construct a pictograph.

I was extremely impressed by the hard-work that the students put into all aspects of this learning experience.  While it does take a lot of work on my part, it is so rewarding when students are able to make connections through more than one content area! 

This is a slide from the PowerPoint that I showed to my class.

Yes, even Komodo Dragons are impacted by global warming.  Rising sea levels may lead to the covering of the islands they call home.

This student decided to focus on the bleaching of coral reefs.

Here's a photo of some of the graphs that my students made to represent polar ice amounts in the Spring, Fall, Winter, and Summer over the past 110 years.

A Trip to Paris: a Math Journey

 

“I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and types of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason, too. ”

The above quote is my favorite statement made in the recently popular children’s novel, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret”, written by Brian Selznick.  While the book has been around for a little while, the recent success of the feature film based on the text, has transformed this book into an adventure on which many children are excited to embark.  When I told the students in my class one day that I had read the book in one morning and loved it, and then proceeded to see the movie and loved the story even more, many of them stated enthusiastically, “Oh…I’ve been wanting to see that movie!”  While it saddened me just a little bit that none of my students expressed an interest in reading the book before seeing the film, I took the response from my class and turned it into an opportunity.  Since the majority of the students in my class never get the chance to go see a movie in theaters until they make their way out of the “ten dollar” theater and into the High Point dollar theater, I figured I had a little time to introduce my students to the visual and literary genius known as Brian Selznick.

I decided that my purpose, my job in the machine during this time in my students’ lives, was to allow my students to experience all that the book had to offer before any of them had the chance to spoil it by seeing the movie (because we all know that this is often the case with films based upon literature).  Almost instantly, I began reading the book to my students during our read aloud time, and it wasn’t long before students started begging me to read further when it was time for us to move onto another subject each day.  While it would just be wonderful to take an entire day sometimes to read a book with my class and allow them the opportunity to just dive into the story in every which way possible, with all of the “non-negotiable” mandates that teachers must meet these days, this dream is simply out of the question!

It was then, that I opted to put my integration skills to work…thank you HPU!

Just last week, while we were still not finished reading the entire book, we had made it through Part One of the story and the students were just as intrigued as I was when I had read the book for the very first time.  Last week was also the dreaded week that we were slotted to take benchmark tests, and while I personally think that tests like these are “silly”, I knew that some of my students would simply freak out if we didn’t have an opportunity to review before the math benchmark.  It was after realizing my students’ love of our read aloud book, and noticing their desire to review the math skills from this quarter, that I devised a plan.

So it was, after making 31 vintage-looking notebooks out of leather-like scrapbook paper and Duct tape, that my students and I traveled back to the time and place where “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” takes place in order to hop on a train that would take us on a marvelous math mystery. 

The notebooks, which were meant to remind the students of the notebook that Hugo had inherited from his father in the story, were filled with pages devoted to helping them review what they knew about length, fractions, and geometry.  The students had to name various polygons that they saw when looking at sketches of the Eiffel Tower.  With illustrations from the actual text, the students were reminded how Hugo stole parts of toys in order to fix his father’s mechanical man, and this made them think about how fractions were parts of a whole.  The students were also able to make a connection with Hugo’s character, who used tools in order to fix toys and clocks, as they were using rulers and protractors to measure lengths and angles.

These are only a few of the vintage looking notebooks that I made for my class.

Students had to use rulers in order to determine types of triangles.

Students had to use protractors to determine the angle measures of the clock hands.

Students had to find different polygons in the Eiffel Tower.

Students had to add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators.

In the book, Hugo and his partner in crime, Isabelle, sneak into a theater to see this movie.  I decided to show it to my students as a hook to the lesson.  After having taken benchmark tests for almost 3 straight hours that morning, we all needed to laugh, and this silent film certainly did the trick!  Many students were not excited about the fact that the movie had no speaking and it was in black and white, yet they were re-thinking that hesitation by the end!  But this was not the only form of multi-media that I used in order to make my students feel as though they were in the story...

In order to make our trip to 1930’s Paris even more authentic, I also had the soundtrack from the movie “Hugo” playing as the students worked in their notebooks.  Many of these students may never have the opportunity to travel around the world, outside the state, or even outside of High Point, but I hope that they will forever remember the day that we took a math journey into a book and ended up halfway around the world!