Using QR Codes for Notes

I really wanted to use QR codes in some way this year. I created a QR Scavenger Hunt to begin my lesson on the Ozone Layer. I was really curious to know how it was going to go, and then I discover, the kids loved it! 

I created it for individual use at a desk and also for an "around the room" type scavenger hunt. I decided to just have the students sit at their desk and work on these individually.

Students used the app Scan on the iPods to scan QR codes. The QR codes lead to short descriptions about the ozone layer that students recorded on their note sheet. Later, student glued their note sheet into their interactive notebooks. I also had a few students use their smart phones. The students were SOOOO excited to use the iPods as well as their cell phones to take notes. You could tell they never did anything like this before, and they want to do it again. It's funny how I tricked them...they were just taking notes :)

This activity is in my TpT store, and I definitely plan to create more!
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Ozone-QR-Scavenger-Hunt-1394909

Lesson Reflection Ball

I have spent the past few weeks thinking of easy things that I can do to make class a little more interesting. One of those things that I decided that I was going to do was to create a Lesson Reflection Ball. Can anyone name a kid that doesn't like to throw things in class? Didn't think so.

I just went to Wal-Mart and grabbed a rubber ball for $2.50, and started coming up with some questions. There where many different colors to choose from! It was bigger than I thought it was going to be, so that meant more questions, but I finally came up with 35.

1) What is one thing that you learned today?

2) What are some ways you could share this learning with your parents of family?

3) Why do you believe we’re studying this objective?

4) What’s one thing the teacher did for this objective that you really liked?

5) What is one question you have after today’s lesson?

6) Name 3 things you learned today.

7) What is one thing you found interesting in the lesson today?

8) What is something that stuck with you today?

9) Create a question based off of today’s lesson.

10) Name at least 3 vocabulary words dealing with today’s lesson.

11) What is one thing you knew about the objective before today’s lessons?

12) Today I learned about _________. I still have a questions about ____________.

13) What was the main idea of the lesson today?

14) How will this lesson relate to the real world?

15) Tell three key ideas from the lesson today.

16) Create a metaphor about today’s objective.

17) Today’s lesson: who, what, when, where, and why?

18) Sum up today’s lesson in one single sentence.

19) My favorite thing about today’s lesson was ______________.

20) Make up a true/false questions based off of today’s lesson.

21) I want to know more about ______________.

22) Make up a multiple choice question based off today’s lesson.

23) What was the easiest part of today’s lesson?

24) What was the hardest part of today’s lesson?

25) If you had to teach today’s lesson to another student, could you do it?

26) Identify the most important concept to know to understand today’s lesson.

27) How will you remember today’s lesson?

28) How did you make sense of today’s lesson? Explain.

29) Explain today’s lesson in your own words.

30) Could today’s lesson apply to another subject? How?

31) Give me 5 vocabulary words from today’s lesson. Go!

32) Make up a fill-in-the-blank question based off of today’s lesson.

33) What can you do to study the material you learned today?

34) Did you learn anything that surprised you today?

35) How might today’s lesson help you?

I can't wait to use it in class! It's perfect for that last minute or two before the bell rings.

Beginnings and Word Walls!

I cannot believe that the school year is almost here! Teachers go back in 17 days..wow! Where has my summer gone? Of course, always a teacher, I have been working on decorations for my room, and I decided that it was time to update my science word wall! I have added SO many more vocabulary words. I now have 128 vocabulary words for my word wall. I knew that my students looked at them so much last year, and they were fascinated with the pictures. When I'd ask a question that they didn't know, they would look at the pictures on the word wall cards to try to figure it out, so I knew I'd have to keep this curiosity going, so I created more! If you have already bought my science word wall cards, you will be able to print the update for free. If not, you can download them at TpT. They are perfect of 7th Grade NC Essential Standards.

TpT is also having a sell on August 4th and 5th. All of my products will be 20% off!

Beginning of the Year: Using Teacher Memes

I thought I was so clever when I decided I wanted to use teacher memes to go in my "Beginning of the Year PowerPoint" to introduce rules and procedures; however, I saw that this was not my brilliant idea, but other teachers have already done this!

Even though I was not the one who came up with this great idea, I thought I'd share a few ideas just in case someone would like to incorporate it in their classroom.

Here are a few slides of my "Beginning of the Year PowerPoint" that I will be using in August.

Here is a link to my Pinterest page where I pinned all of the memes I used in my presentation! I can't wait to show my students!

http://www.pinterest.com/knorville13/teacher-funnies/

End-Of-Grade Test Time

I just cannot believe that next week, it is time for my students to take their End-of-Grade Assessments. This year has flown by! My students have been quite nervous because they have big tests in Math, Reading, Science, and Social Studies.

To make this a little less stressful for them, I got a little "pinteresty" and made an EOG survival kit for my math students and made something small for my science students. On the back of my survival kits, I also left a sweet message. They were so happy!

Finding Surface Area

I am only in my third year of teaching, but I know that in the past, my students have always had trouble with surface area. I had to come up with something new this year to help them understand what surface area ACTUALLY is!

I started taking a bunch of pop cubes and putting them together to make 6 rectangular prisms of different sizes. I then put my students into 6 different groups.

I began to explain that surface area is the area of all of the sides added ALTOGETHER! I explained that it was like trying to figure out exactly how much wrapping paper you would need to wrap a present. To find the surface area of the rectangular prism pop cubes, students had to count the squares on the top and bottom, left and right, and front and back sides, then they had to add them up together to find the surface area.

I gave the groups about 2 minutes to find the surface area of the rectangular prism, then students rotated the prisms clockwise to the next group.

After we finished this activity, we moved to nets and then to other prisms and pyramids!

It was like a light bulb turned on when they got it!

Life-Size Respiratory System Model

I absolutely love teaching the body systems! There are so many neat things that you can do to teach them. There are so many questions that the students come up with that make it fun as well.

For the beginning of our Respiratory System lessons, I decided to let my students make a life-size model of the respiratory system. This allowed them to get familiar with the parts while moving around and enjoying class.

I put them into groups of four. Each student had a job. Students were to trace an outline of someone in their group and then draw and label specified parts.

Jobs:

1) Materials/Piece of Art – in charge of gathering materials needed and will be the person getting traced. Responsible for helping the recorder.

2) Time Keeper – Make sure to get the task done within the allotted time; Will also be in charge of helping the artist.

3) Artist – Draw the respiratory system .

4) Recorder – The recorder will write down the functions for each body part and will be responsible for telling the rest of the group.

Students were given a textbook picture of the respiratory system to go by. They were to draw and label the following respiratory system parts:

1) Nose

2) Pharynx

3) Larynx

4) Trachea

5) Bronchi

6) Bronchioles

7) Alveoli

8) Lungs

9) Diaphragm

It was so funny to see the students doing this. It was also funny seeing how big the outline of the body became because the artist was too afraid to get close to the person being traced.

Here are some of examples of my students' work.

Sale Sale Sale!!

If you haven't heard yet, Teachers Pay Teachers is running a sale 2/27-2/28. It's starting tomorrow!!

EVERYTHING in my store will be 20% off plus the TpT discount.

I know I"ll be buying some items as well!

Cell City

I wish I could say that the idea of cell city was my own, but this is definitely not true. I have no idea who come up with the idea first, but Google helped me put this project together for my students.

I gave my students the options of building a model of a cell city or a drawing. They had to include the important organelles (they were given a list) and everything had to be labeled. This was my first year doing this, and I was very excited!

There were a few things I would change:

1) I placed students into groups of 4. I wish I would have assigned them to certain "jobs".
2) This was an in-class project, so I wish I would have emphasized time-management a little bit more.
3) I also teach math, so my tables are in rows. I wish I would have taken the time to place the tables into groups to prevent group-to-group conversations.
4) I told my students the cell city analogies, and I wish I would have given them the opportunity to come up with the analogies on their own, or at least try to match them.

If you plan to do a cell city, take the time to plan it out, and you will be grateful for your results!

Here are pictures of my students' work!

Lever Lab

Now, I love all science, don't get me wrong, but I am super excited about starting the biology unit with my 7th graders! It's my all time favorite. Hopefully I will be doing a lot of exciting activities in this unit so that I can share!

We ended our physical science unit with simple machines. There were so many things we could have done with this unit, but with the lack of time we had to choose one activity. We chose to do a lever lab! It was a very simple lab, but covered the important concepts of levers.

We first gave the students a stack of 5 pennies (taped together), a ruler, and they could use a pen or pencil. They used this to construct a lever.

The objective of the lab was so that students will understand the relationship between effort force, resistance fore, and the location of the fulcrum. In this lab, the pennies represented the resistance force, the student's finger representing the effort force, and the pen represented the fulcrum.

Students would follow these steps:

1. Construct a lever using the ruler as the straight bar and the pen as the fulcrum.

2. Place the pen beneath the ruler at the 6 inch mark. Place the stack of pennies over the 1 inch mark.

3. Push down on the 12 inch mark on the ruler. When you push on the ruler, you are exerting an effort force.

4. Move the fulcrum to the 8 inch mark and repeat step 4.

5. Move the pen back to the 4 inch mark and repeat step 4.

And then, we students were to answer these questions before discussion:

Conclusions:

     1) How did your effort force differ between the three trials?

2) Explain how increasing and decreasing the distance between the effort force and the fulcrum affected the effort force.  What type of lever is this?

3) How does this relate to where you push on a door when opening it?

Also, I will be throwing a SUPER BOWL SALE on my TpT websites as well as my TN site.

My Teachers Pay Teachers sale will run from 2/2-2/3 and will be 20% off!!!

My Teachers Notebook sale starts today 2/1 - 2/3 and will be my 20% off plus an additional percent off from teacher's notebook!

Science Fair

Our school just finished up our science fair. All of our projects were due last Friday, and I'm so proud of my students' work! They did great!

Along with the posters, some of my students brought in part of their experiments, even though I told them not to. I really didn't have room for any other items besides the posters and reports, but I'm glad a few brought them in. We had a ball!

I had a student bring in their electromagnet they created.

We also had a lava lamp.

We had a plasma ball!

This was one of my favorite boards. Super girly! Unfortunately, it did not place. We figured it needed more data, and also, the pictures should have been taken in the same lighting. But no matter what, it is a fantastic poster!!