Take Me Back... Wednesday...Sorry

I love to see how far I have come with my blog. Last year, I had my own homemade blog, pretty cheesy, no followers, few posts. For my birthday this year, September... I bought myself a blog, a real one, and I love it. I can share my Farm to School ideas, Science ideas, FOSS connections, and connect with other bloggers. I watch every day to see if I get another follower. I take myself back to my first post last year that showed something that is timely...cranberries.

I think my students really loved the Thanksgiving themed activities. Who doesn't love eating popcorn and bouncing berries? I thought I would love Cranberry Thanksgiving, but what seemed to work out better was pictures of cranberry bogs, plants, and processing of the berries that I showed on an I pad. We used our five senses in the younger grades with both popcorn and cranberries. I was impressed that most of the students tried the tart treat. As for the popcorn activity the soaked seeds didn't pop, the lesson was a success, and the sheets helped guide my kiddos. I am posting the activities on TpT. Hope you like them.

The leftover berries were great. We used them to make homemade cranberry sauce. My son thought it was pretty awesome that the berries he picked for me were actually tasty once you add a bit of sugar and orange juice to the pot.

Planting a Seed...

Squash. Who would have thunk the kids would like squash soup? Well, we surveyed our kids and our littles voted half and half for liking and disliking the taste of butternut squash soup. I thought that was pretty good. We made the soup in the crock pot, shared the recipe and how to prepare it and yum, the majority of our bigs liked it. We even made homemade applesauce in the crock pot, too. We want to provide our after school classes the ability to try new things, be okay with not liking it, and learning ways to share these ideas with their families. We had a drawing for free butternut squash from our garden...they even loved that prize. It was so cute, I even got letters the next day from them thanking me for the food. Yesterday, we served squash in the lunch line. Can't wait to see the numbers of kiddos that tried it:)

 Our little survey with the littles. Tie isn't so bad!

 Thank you notes are sooo fun to get. I love that she said that the soup tasted like chicken noodle soup, we used chicken stock.

 What does butternut squash look like inside?

We finished up our Fall Harvest snacks by reading Fall Harvest. Just planting a seed, my garden friends.

Junk Yard Science and Flying Marshmallows

Found a great website to use to help the students use FOSS and yet connect it to what we are learning...variables. Here is the sheet I made to go with it and a quick video to show.

Electromagnet Warm Up Sheets

I included the answer key on the second page, and the link to the lesson I am using for the activity. 

Now, onto 5th grade. Here is the idea and sheet for my bigs as they build catapults for marshmallow shooters. I can't wait to see the marshmallows fly. 

 

                             Marshmallow Catapult Directions

Peek At My Week

Well, in our district, we are on a day one, two, three, four, five schedule this year. Confusing...yes, do we miss a day with our kids...no.  So, teaching science all day looks kind of like this... my day ones, what might be a Monday for someone else, is actually on Thursday for me. Yikes, right?!? My Thursday, started like this.. Each day we start out with a fourth or fifth grade, followed by a third grade. My afternoons, are kindergarten, first, then second grade...each and every day, but day fives...Wednesday's right now. That is when most of my prep time is. Three days a week, I also teach an enrichment class of 15 kids in third grade. I teach reading, writing, science, and math to this group. They help pick out the concept they want to learn. This next unit, is space. So, I am organizing a space unit for them. At least, I get a chance to change it up a bit, but I do love teaching science. Our kids get so bogged down with learning every second, science lets them get some hands on fun, while learning.

I will post pictures this week once my kiddos start their new experiments. I can't wait to see if my fifth graders can make a catapult out of 10 tongue depressors and  two rubber bands to toss marshmallows into the air for them to catch in their mouths. I am working on the sheets to go with it today. I will share that free. Stay tuned.

Storybook Science

Here is my latest Unit for sale on TPT. It takes the concept of a storybook for kids and connects it to other books, writing, reading, and of course science. Our kindergarten teachers love it and so do I. It allows great connections to our new standards and common core.

Storybook Science: Chicken Little and Gravity

What's A Slope Mrs. Heinrich?

The cutest thing, one of our kinders asked me this question yesterday. I looked down at her sweet face and said, "we are going to be scientists and conduct an experiment to find that out." She replied, "what's a experiment?"

We started our slope lesson asking if they ever went sledding. Duh, we live in Wisconsin and have a hill at our school. Vocabulary word number one, slope. Now to the experiment part... we are going to set up an experiment to find out if a big slope or hill makes us go faster or does a small hill make us go faster? We made a prediction. Look at all that vocabulary. I had our kiddos get a car to place on our graph. Then we went to set up our experiment.

We set up two slopes a big one and a little one. Then we raced our cars down the hills. We shared our findings to see if our predictions were correct. We then filled out a sheet to share our conclusions and findings. There pictures show it all...they got it. Before my kinders

left, I asked the class, "what is a slope?" "Moving on a slant!" "A hill!" Well then kids, what is an experiment? "A test!" Cool beans, when kindergartners "get it"!

Castle Catapults

Our FOSS 5th grade unit has us testing variables, however sometimes the kids have a hard time connecting to why they are making lifeboats, pendulums, or flippers. In an older post, I shared how I introduced the lesson...here is how I wrap it up. Each group tests for length of stick and angles. We figure out what angle gives the best distance and the length of stick that gives us the height we need. We then give each kingdom a chance to scale the wall of the there castles in the room. The can change the length of stick or the angle or both now to use what they learned in their controlled experiment. We give them a chart to tally out of three tries how many times they scaled the wall of a castle. The winning team gets Burger King Crowns and are rulers of the room. We discuss how kingdoms were won and lost due to battles such as this. It makes it make sense as to how it relates to history.
Castle Catapult Sheet

Here is a group trying to scale the castle walls. Who will be rulers of the kingdom?