Fascinating Blog and Hilarious Science Videos!

I got nominated for a "Fascination Award." What a nice honor! You can click here to vote for me...I was nominated for my post about my Sensory Details and Bacon lesson!

And in other news, the Science STAAR test is coming up! Here's a secret, I LOVE my job, but I REALLLLLY miss teaching science!! So, I've been sneaking in some science lately to help my team get ready for the test coming up this week! We've done several non-fiction reading activities with science books.

But, what the kids and I love most of all is sneaking in some Mr. Parr science songs from Youtube! They are perfect to throw in here and there for a little song break! If you haven't checked these out, you must!! Each video is a pop song with the lyrics changed to be about science topics. The vocabulary and depth of the concepts are definitely grade 5 and up! Here are some of my classes favorites:

There are so many more, so I hope you check them out! Hope you all are having a wonderful weekend!

Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Color

Here is a book that I've come to love. It is new to me, but it was published in the 60s, so many of you have probably seen it. Okay, on first looks, I definitely judged this book by it's cover. I thought it looked a wee bit hokey. I was totally wrong! This is a very neat poetry book. Each poem is based on a particular color and lists words, nouns feelings and associations that go with that color, all done with beautiful poetry. My kids enjoyed this book very much and loved guessing what color we would do next. I would HIGHLY recommend it for poetry grades 3-6!

The new state assessment in Texas (STAAR) now has poetry listed as an objective that could be tested. So here is a long list of concepts we worked on/activities you could do with this amazing book!

- Predicting: Each poem lists many things that are a color. So, for example, to hook them into the lesson, you could share with them the color of the poem before you read and have them predict what words or items of that color would show up in the poem and see who gets the most correct.

-Imagery! The "What is Red?" poem has some great images!

-Internal Rhyme--"What is Grey?" poem contains internal rhyme! (This is eligible to be tested as well.)

-Figurative Language runs throughout.

-Sensory Details and onomatopoeia examples come up frequently.

-"Sketching through the text" as they visualize the poem could be used with any color.

- After you have read some of the poems, you could have them write their own poem with a color you haven't read about!

These are just a few ideas you could incorporate into a poetry unit using this book! I hope you enjoy!