It’s my 33rd year teaching and the first two weeks are in the books! The first two weeks of my 33rd year were excellent and I not only enjoyed them but they filled me with excitement for this school year!
I get to teach both Math and Science again this year. The last time I taught Math was 2004, then 16 years later, 2021-22, I got to teach Math again. Last year, 22-23, we had so many extra students enroll that we were able to hire a Math teacher for our 5th and 6th grade students so I taught only Science again. This year we only have 33 6th graders! With our 12 5th graders have 45 students total! We have two classes with 22 and 23 students so our class sizes are wonderful. I get to teach all the Math and Science and my partner teaches all the ELA and Social Studies. Having small class sizes is great for both the students and for our teacher workloads but declining enrollment is not good for our small school district so these small class sizes are both a blessing and a curse.
I start the year with an introduction to my gamified classroom with a Star Trek theme, hence my blue Science officer Star Trek shirt in the above image. I start my class introduction with my Voyages of the Starship Equinox slideshow. I chose the Equinox because it’s a small, maximum crew of about 80, Science vessel introduced in the Voyager series.
Thanks to EMC2Learning we send home what I consider a very cool look course manual or syllabus. I love how it looks like a comic book. Click here to see the full manual. We added a parental consent form to use Bing’s AI Chatbot with students this year so we can start guiding our students on how to use AI responsibly and ethically.
On Day 1 of school, the Tuesday after Labor Day, students were able to participate in the world famous Marshmallow Challenge! That’s always a great way to start the school year.
On day two I had students conduct an incredibly fun lab that including using all the most fun science materials: goggles, test tubes, beakers, flasks, graduated cylinders, pipettes, funnels, and measuring spoons! And they got to do some chemistry with vinegar and baking soda! Instead of just mixing the acid and the base to produce a chemical reaction and make CO2, students were able to conduct an experiment by changing the amount of vinegar they added to their baking soda to see what happens. We use balloons to trap the CO2 and measured the circumference of the balloons to quantify the amount of gas! I love this lab!
I used my trusty Inquiry Boards to guide students through the process of setting up their lab then they went to work. By pouring the measured vinegar into balloons, securing the balloon to the top of a test tube with measured baking soda, all you have to do is tip the balloon to get the vinegar into the test tube and voila – the reaction produces the CO2 gas and we collect it all in the balloon!
Students had a great time and this past week, after we got through setting up our Classcraft accounts to “play” our class game and rolling our Classcraft/Star Trek characters (I have 24 sets of D&D dice!), students started to practice writing a Claim, Evidence, Reasoning or CER conclusion to their lab.
Also during our second week we got to start our amazing garden program which will be happening every Monday and by October I’ll start taking kids to our creek to start fish trapping to ID and count fish as part of our school’s Ocean Guardian School projects.
For Math I’m combining strategies from Building Thinking Classrooms with workshops I’m taking from Pam Harris’s Math is Figure-Out-Able to help kids “mathematize!” We did our first whiteboarding activity with the Four Fours Puzzle and it was great! I also started with an area model problem string for multiplying two-digits times two-digit numbers!
So after nine days during our first two weeks together the Marshmallow Challenge and the vinegar and baking soda lab were a hit! Classcraft, as always, is a total hit! I shared my Why Math Pear Deck activity and it was also a hit! I tried for the first time Pear Deck’s new Giant Steps with a single digit divisor activity also using area models and it was amazing! I will surely continue using Giant Steps! Finally, I tried for the first time a Curipod lesson that Curipod help me create about Math careers. It was also a hit, especially the slides that provided AI feedback to the students’ typed responses! The word cloud slide feature and the slides where students got to vote on each other’s responses were also very well met and super engaging for my students. So cool. And I officially became a Curipod Ambassador so let me know if you want to try Curipod Premium free for three months and I can send you a code! Just leave a comment or email me at educatoral at gmail dot com.
The kids have been great and with such an amazing first two weeks of school I am incredibly excited about all the great things we will be doing together this year!
