Book Trailers

Earlier this year a colleague and I attended a couple of ELA conferences. Both conferences spent a large amount of time talking about book trailers and how fabulous they are. We were sold by the time we left and thought we would try it as a lesson for our tutoring groups. Basically, book trailers are a lot like movie trailers: trying to get audiences interested in checking it out by giving enough of a hook without giving away the ending. It teaches almost every objective for our junior high students, but can also benefit elementary and high school students. By the time our project was complete we covered: plot structure, foreshadowing, inferencing, tone, mood, main idea, summarizing, planning, drafting, editing, point of view, and persuasive writing.

We introduced the project by first showing them some book trailers we found online:

http://philbildner.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byvAz25jFX8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5l3Tikc3O0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYp3YWoCM1s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQjcdiOvEyQ

Students used Photo Story to create their trailer and had no trouble navigating the fool-proof program that lets you upload and edit images, add music, voice, and text, and decide the transition between slides. Here are a couple of my favorites:

The kids had so much fun and really took pride in their work! The entire project took about 2 weeks (3 days a week for 55 minutes).

Below are the materials we gave students to get started. (Hopefully they download/print for you. I have never used this program before! If not, email me and I will send you the documents.)

Book Trailer Requirements

Book Trailer Rubric
Plot Structure

~Mrs. Scott

Valentine Themed Ideas

Here are some pretty awesome websites for your class to visit during the chaos that accompanies this sweet holiday.

Word Hearts - This site creates a heart-shaped word cloud. Would be great to brainstorm a list of things kids love or adjectives that mean love.
Valentine Word Drop - players must unscramble the words before they hit the bottom of the screen.


Heart Sudoku
My Money Valentine - Game is played like the online lemonade stand, but with an amorous twist

Starfall Connecting Words - elementary students can learn about connecting words while creating their own Valentines

Heart Writing - Don't let the foreign language throw you off when you enter the site. Simply type a paragraph into the box and choose "layout text" to create your own heart.
Counting Candy Hearts - reinforces number corelation in lower elementary

Plate Tectonics

Science is by no means my area of expertise, but I am helping to tutor students in the subject. I think being a novice in a subject works as an advantage sometimes, because it is easier to see it from a fresh perspective. This week we worked on plate tectonics.

Like always, I found a videos to start with. (Our district has an account with brainpop.com, so I showed that one first. If your district doesn't have an account, they need to get one, or you need to write a grant! They have bunches of videos, mostly aimed at the secondary level and are quick and a little funny.) The other video didn't have much of a lesson with it, but the kids were entertained:


The art teacher at my school was nice enough to lend some supplies to me execute my idea. I borrowed clay and we built boundaries. I love my kinesthetic learners!
They had so much fun with the clay!
...and each one had their own way to illustrate their understanding.
~Mrs. Scott

Surface Area

We recently learned about surface area. For some reason, this is always a hard concept for students, and then add in some funky formulas on the formula chart and it totally throws them for another loop. I prefer just to teach them how to find the area of each side and add them together.

I like to start lessons with a brainpop video or youtube video/song. Sometimes you get some good ones, other times they are a little cheesy, but still memorable, like this one:




I thought it might be fun to do something different than just drawing a picture of the sides. We pulled out some paint and 3-dimensional shapes and stamped the sides instead!

When the posters dried (we used a hair dryer borrowed from the nurse), we started measuring and calculating!
~Mrs. Scott

Wii in the Classroom

My husband and I bought this game some time around my first year of teaching 8th grade math: As soon as we started playing I realized some of the games had objectives that I had been teaching in class!

Perspectives:
Ordering Numbers:
I had the bright idea to unplug my Wii and take it to school! I think it was the most engaged my class of 35 students had been all year! Since then, I make a point to have "Wii day" a couple of times a year and the kids could not be more excited!

I have looked on Amazon and found a couple of other educational Wii games, but haven't bought any yet. Maybe future grant?

ThinkSMART appears to have games best for high school: Science Papa lets you explore chemistry, biology, physics, and paleontology through science experiments.
Reader Rabbit has a couple of games for early elementary grades (I think I saw Pre-K through 3rd grade).
My Word Coach looks like it would be great for GT and high school classes, but may be a fun warm-up for a typical middle school classes too.

Jump Start advertises being great for ages 5-9.As if you haven't seen this show! Upper elementary classes would love this:
We recently bought an XBox Kinect for our son and may have to start checking out games for that too! If you know any other games, please share!

~Mrs. Scott

Homemade Christmas Gifts

Pinterest inspired me to give homemade gifts for school Christmas presents. I actually came up with ideas for my boys teachers without stealing them from someone else, and they didn't include they typical coffee mugs that teachers always end up with!

Homemade cake balls:

1 tub for each teacher and a jar-full for daycare.

At school, our Student Council gave baggies of Jolly Ranchers to all of the staff:

~Mrs. Scott

Geometry Ornaments

The Christmas tree in my classroom was needing some decorating, so I took the opportunity to review geometry with my students.

This would make a great classroom lesson for lower grade levels (4-7th). I bought some gumdrops from Walmart (mini marshmallows work too, but aren't as colorful), and used left over spaghetti noodles and toothpicks.

Students build 3-dimensional shapes (could work with 2-d shapes too) using the supplies given. We built cubes, triangular prisms & pyramids, rectangular prisms & pyramids, and then students calculated the number of faces, edges, and vertices, and showed me which side they would use to calculate "B," the area of the base.

~Mrs. Scott