Jack of All Trades

Saturday, April 14, 2012

MNM: Setting Up the Math Notebook

New goal.... hopefully to accomplish.... is trying to post each:

Saturday or Sunday post about my Science notebooks (SNS- Science Notebook Saturday).
Monday about my Math Notebooks (MNM- Math Notebook Monday)

We will see how I do.
Well I guess I'll start at the beginning... that only makes sense. Notebooks are AWESOME!! I did my first in my Algebra II class in high school back in the 90's, and I loved the organization of it all!!

I have been using notebooks for the past 3 years and I have found that composition notebooks are the best! You don't have to worry about kids tearing out pages, having to keep up with a binder that you know they will put other stuff into, or those spirals with the perforated edge that always seems to loose its pages (fought this battle and lost). Composition books are smaller than spirals but the fact that they don't loose their pages and are just the right size for a semester of notes, are enough benefits for me. Each semester requires a notebook, and we spend the first or second day of school decorating them. You can check out my post about decorating notebooks here. These notebooks grow during the year, so I had to find a way to keep them closed- enter the giant rubber band. You can find my post about closing the journals here.

Okay.... so are you decorated??? and do you have the closure??? Excellent!!! Now for the interior set up.

Hopefully you can go to the dollar tree and get a package of these small manila envelopes (8 for a dollar). Each envelope will be used for 2 kids. They look like this:

Just have the kids lick it closed and cut it in half. Now you have a little pocket perfect to hold homework (folded in half), a protractor, and "THE TEST" formula sheet. You know... the one with the inches on one side and cm on the other. Now the students cant say they didn't have a ruler to do that perimeter homework you assigned. Yes.... its genius. Now just glue it into the inside of the front cover. You can always reinforce with tape if needed.

Make a cover page however you want, and then a table of contents (TOC). I wish all my kids would keep up with the TOC but they all don't, but the ones who do... love it. So it's worth putting in there. We use the front and the back of each page (I would not have enough pages if I didn't) We use 5 individual pages for our table of contents.

This is the only back page we don't use. Its the back of the title page.

Another 2 pages look like this... that should make 5 TOC pages.

Another thing you could add is an Index to the back of the journal for all the new vocabulary you will teach. I did this in my 1st semester journal but I didn't keep up with it, and I noticed that the kids would never use it to go back and find their pages. They would use the TOC. It's up to you. I liked teaching them the "why" we have an index and how to use and make it, but they just didn't use it often enough. Maybe next year.

If you want, you can have kids number the pages all the pages in their notebook early, but we number the pages each day, that way I know we are all on the same page.... literally.... and pun... hahaha!

Look for next weeks post on worksheet foldables in the math journal!

Friday, April 13, 2012

Journey to the Center of the Earth.... Model

So this week we started Earth Science... one of my faves!!!! My TEK stated that the students were to build a model of the layers of the earth, but when they know nothing about the earth it makes the concept of building kind of tough. So we started from square one: KWL chart, and they came up with some great questions under the W. One of my students even asked "My dog digs in the ground to make a hole to cool off in, but how can the layers heat up as we go further into the earth?" I love it!! After making the KWL chart together, my students read in their book and completed a little worksheet of the information they learned. Then they added into the L section of the KWL on their own. This was all on Monday.

Tuesday we created this foldable.

I just made a paper copy of the circles in a word document and they colored and labeled each circle. I told them that we didn't want to just slap the foldable together, we want them all centered. So after some prodding, they came up with folding each circle into 1/4 to find the center point and then stack them. We glued only 1/2 of each circle down so we could flip it and write facts about each layer.
Then I informed them of making a model this week. They were so excited, and so was I!!! I told them for homework they had to bring a batch of play dough (not store bought) to school by Thursday, and I supplied them with this recipe. We would color it Thursday, and make the models on Friday. FYI: We had lots of left overs from this recipe!
Wednesday the students researched through reading different books that I placed at their table, and wrote just facts under each flap of each layer of their foldable. The last 20 minutes or so we talked about making our model to scale. My students are 6th graders, and in math we do A LOT of proportional studies. So we naturally made our model to scale. Using some measurements given to us in our textbook, and this worksheet

we determined that our layers should be the following measurements:

Crust : 1 mm
Lithosphere (mantle part only): 1mm
Mantle: 4 cm
Outer Core: 3 cm
Inner Core: 3 cm diameter.

This was such a great lesson at this time of year since it was a wonderful review of making proportions and tying in circles. I loved it when they would say... This is science, not math! And we would discuss how they overlap.

The students were very careful with their measurements. Here are a few pictures of the project in motion....

Warning: Those of you who are afraid of chaos and mess ( like me) please take a deep breath before viewing.