Electricity Unit Resources

Don't you just love when you find resources in the most unlikely of places?

If you teach 4th or 6th grade (and really any other grade level where you teach electricity), these will be like gold to you! APS (Arizona Public Service) is an electricity company here in Arizona and they have created these great informative power points about renewable and non-renewable energy that I have used in my classroom.  

Unfortunately I can't find where these great power points are sourced from since the links seems to be broken, but this is where they were originally downloaded from. 

What I love about these is that they have notes with additional information so that you can learn more and it also sometimes adds in activities that you can do as well. 

APS has power points for...

SUSTAINABILITY

ELECTRICITY

WIND

SOLAR

HYDROPOWER

GEOTHERMAL

BIOMASS

Just click on the pictures or titles to download. Even though they look the same because they have the same introductory title slide, they are all different and fabulous. I hope you enjoy! 

Group Presentations

I love project based learning. I will often assign my students expert group presentation assignments that the students get to choose what they want to present based on a list of choices.

Right now in 6th Grade, we are doing natural disasters so the students were allowed to choose a natural disaster to present on. They were given questions that they needed to research and had to create a presentation that included at least one type of technology.  They could choose the form of presentation that they wanted to do, but most usually choose power point.

I love these assignments because it allows for so many opportunities to research, summarize information, presentation skills, non-fiction comprehension, collaborative team work, and much much more.

I used someone's packet and adapted it to fit my needs and now I don't remember who created the original packet! If you did or know who did let me know!

Click the picture below to download the natural disasters presentation guidelines:

While the students are presenting, I always think it is important to have the other students be doing something. Not only does it keep them busy so they won't be tempted to get squirrely during others' presentations, but also helps me to see if they were listening and learned something from these. This is just an example of one I would use, but the nice thing is that you can adjust it to the presentations that the kids are making. I also like that it gives them a chance to write an affirmation down for each group. We talk about how just writing down "good presentation" or "you did a good job" isn't an acceptable affirmation and that we should strive to write down specific things that the group did well based on what we know good presenters do (eye contact, clear speaking, didn't read straight from the slide, etc).

Click the picture below to download the "what the other students are doing during presentations" page (haha, I can never think of a good title for these!):

Do you do expert group presentations in your class? What do you have the other students do while their classmates are presenting?

Rivers and Lakes Freebies

Happy Saturday!
Here's a few science freebies for you all! We are wrapping up our Rivers, Lakes, and Oceans unit and I thought I would share some foldables and graphic organizers that I have made.

I wish I had pictures of these in action, but trust me they are worth a free download. ;) 

Erosion Foldable
River Systems Foldable
River Stages Chart
Rivers and Lakes Quiz

Enjoy and leave some love if you download!

Snow White Experiment

I'm on fall break! Woohoo! This is the first year that my district has done fall break, and I have to say it's not shabby. I'm not hating the fact that I am on my couch with a pumpkin spice latte doing laundry while blog stalking.  :)

This past week, my students had just wrapped up their science processes unit so I decided to do a fun project to asses and give our unit some closure.

Have you ever seen this book? I bought it on Amazon and love it!

It takes a handful of popular fairy tales and gives you ideas for experiments for each one. Along with each experiment comes a handout for the students to complete and an explanation. It's fabulous!

I decided to do the Snow White experiment. In the fairy tale, Snow White lays in a glass coffin for years and is as pretty as a peach the whole time while being dead as a doornail. So I asked my students, what do you think would happen if we put an organic item in a sealed container?  My students made hypothesis and stated evidence to back it.  I then broke the students up into groups and each group mushed up a banana and put that into one bottle, broke up a piece of celery into another bottle, and then put some leaves in a third bottle (fruit, vegetable, and plant). You then put a balloon over the top of the water bottle and seal with tape. As the fruit rots, the balloon will collect the gases that the rotting food and bacteria give off.

After fall break, we are going to go back and check out our experiments. Ew. I am anticipating some disgusting outcomes especially from the banana a week old, bleh. I'll take some pictures, I'm sure you can't wait to look at them!  Have a good week!

Watery Coins Experiment

Good evening!

I hope everyone is having a great weekend. I am hoping to catch up on some grading that I have to get done ~ I am falling sooo behind! My blogging habit probably doesn't help that too much, but it's just way more enticing than grading.

This week, I did a little prediction experiment with my sixth graders. We are going through the Scientific Process and this was an excellent experiment about making predictions and also reviewing different variables.  The science lab was occupado, but no worries, we had a floor so we still had room to be scientists!

P.S. My students look slightly creepy with blacked out faces!

 

The students make predictions as to how many water drops can fit on each coin before hand. The materials they will need are: a vessel for water, paper towels, droppers, a penny, nickel, dime, and quarter. They put drops of water on each coin, counting the drops, until it overflows. The students fill out the form as they go and then average their data at the end.  Click the picture to download the PDF.

I hope you can use this experiment in your classroom! The kids had so much fun doing this and they were all very surprised how off their predictions were. Have a great weekend!

No Bones About It!

Over the past week we started our science unit on the Human Body.  I decided to start on the skeletal system and then we are going to move on to muscles this week.  I had my students memorize some of the key bones and they were given a test on Friday. Most of them did really well, but some you can definitely tell that there was no additional studying going on at home. Here's a couple of freebies in case you go over the skeletal system in your classroom! 

Here's the paper I gave out on Monday as the study guide.

 Another that day that week, I had my students do this match-up activity with partners.

And then finally, the big test-ola!

I hope you can use these in your classroom! Have a great week!

Simple Machines

In science, we are learning about force and motion and with that comes simple machines.  I learned so much when creating my lesson for simple machines.  Did you know that a broom is a simple machine?  It's a lever!  Ah the wonders of 5th grade... Feel free to use this if you ever have the inkling to do a little simple machines hunt at home yourself.  

Columbus and Goo?

No school on Monday!  Thanks Columbus, you're the best.  This week I am attempting to make "goo" with my 5th graders as part of our Matter Unit.  Being a math and science teacher, I sadly don't get to science as much as I would like, so this will definitely be an adventure!   I am posting my goo lab activity sheet that will go with it.  I adapted it from Engaging Lessons. Nothing says Columbus Day like some slime... right?