One of the first units that my students study every year is genre. This is because I want them to be able to record the genres of the different books that they read so that they can keep track of their reading lives.
Before we can even jump into genre, we start with the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Surprisingly enough, many of my students in grades 4 and 5 do not know the difference.
I used two books to help teach this lesson. We started by reading The Perfect Nest.
This hilarious story had my upper elementary students laughing their heads off. After reading the book, we recorded all of the characteristics of a fiction story that we noticed in our Venn Diagram.
Next we read Farms. Then we recorded the characteristics of a Non-Fiction text in our Venn Diagram.
Finally we put characteristics that describe both types of texts in the middle of the Venn Diagram.
Here is what our final anchor chart looked like. This is now hanging in our classroom as a reminder for students. I am actually surprised at how often they reference it!
I work at a very multicultural school. Over the years, I have found that one way to build classroom community is to learn about our many different cultures. I have several First Nations students in my classroom and these are some of the methods that we use to learn about their culture.
Read Alouds:
Who doesn't love a good book? Here are some of my favourite read alouds for introducing students to First Nations, Métis and Inuit cultures.
Inuit Culture:
Northern Lights: The Soccer Trails
Baseball Bats for Christmas
A Promise is a Promise
Métis Culture:
Dancing in my Bones
Fiddle Dancer
Jenneli's Dance
First Nations Culture:
Beneath Raven Moon
Berry Magic
The Salmon Twins
Classroom Decor
I love to showcase my First Nations, Métis and Inuit Alphabet Cards in my classroom. Not only are these cards beautiful, they make for great discussion points when studying First Nations, Métis and Inuit Cultures. You can pick up your own copy of these cards here.
Independent Reading Time:
My FAVOURITE series to teach kids about First Nations, Métis and Inuit Cultures is Raven Tales by David Bouchard. You can order these books on the Scholastic Website. I have the entire set and my students LOVE them! They are all graphic novels and even my struggling grade 4 readers enjoy these books.
Integrating Art (Residential Schools):
There are many fabulous art projects that you can do with your students to learn about First Nations, Métis and Inuit Cultures. I think that the most meaningful project is Project of Heart.
Materials:
Each student in your class will need a small wooden tile. You will also need a variety of Sharpies. (Note: don't use regular markers because the colours will bleed!)
Procedure:
Introduce Students to Residential Schools.
Two books that I have used in the past to do this are Fatty Legs and When I Was Eight.
I use both of these books in my upper elementary classroom.
Explain to students that in order to remember what happened in Residential Schools and in order to move towards reconciliation, they will each be creating a tile. Then all of the tiles will be put together to create a beautiful mosaic. These tiles are to commemorate all of the children that died in Residential Schools as well as all of the survivors.
The Project for Heart has a great guide on their website. You can access it here.
Here are some sample mosaics:
I hope that this gives you some ideas that you can use in your own classroom! Feel free to pin the image below so that you can come back to this post when you need it.
Right now in Science, we are studying Classroom Chemistry. I wanted to incorporate a little bit of Halloween fun into our unit! Students LOVED the labs and I LOVED how much learning was happening!
Here are some of the activities that we did:
Separating Mixtures:
First we watched these videos about separating mixtures. (I skip over the parts that talk about distilling alcohol).
Next, students worked towards getting their magic potions certificate. They had to follow the recipe that I gave them exactly. (water, staples, sand, salt, rice). Then they worked to separate the mixture so that they were left with only water. This was a great critical thinking and perseverance activity because students had to keep trying, even when their original plan didn't work. In the end, all groups were successful. The trickiest part was explaining to their potions professor (me) how they planned to separate the salt from the water.
Here are the materials that students used to separate materials.
Types of Mixtures:
We also learned about different types of mixtures by cooking up some delicious treats!
Students had to identify the type of mixture that each recipe made (homogeneous, heterogeneous). Then they sampled the treats!
I created some simple Interactive Notebook Activities to go along with our lab. This way, students can record their learning AND use this information to study for our quiz.
Next week we are going to be making halloween crystals and growing ghosts with a vinegar and baking soda reaction.
The kiddos are loving this unit so far and it is amazing how much they learn when they are super engaged!
Interested in trying this unit out in your own classroom? It includes 5 fun labs with instructions, labels and interactive notebook pages! Check it out here. It's 50% off for the first 10 buyers.
