One of the big ideas in 4th grade science is looking at how plants (and animals) have various structures that help them to survive.  We have looked at videos and read textbooks, but I thought we could use a little hands-on experience with it.   In my classroom, we are lucky enough to have a Lettuce Grow Farm Stand.  Since this planting season they each are observing one of the plants we have in the stand, I had them cut one leaf off of their specific plant to observe, diagram, and measure in a science journal.  I wanted them to look at the *structure* of the leaf, not only focus on the color and feel.  So I whipped up this little science journal template for them to use that would keep them on track with their observations. Since they were journaling, I had them start off with the basics.  They drew their leaf as accurately as possible, keeping in mind to keep the picture big so that they could label with proper vocabulary.  I walked them through the ......

Several years ago I began using Johnny Appleseed Day, September 26,  as a day to incorporate STEM and Literacy thematically in my classroom.  When I taught 5th, I used lots of tech and STEM activities that went along with our curriculum that the kids LOVED (you can read about those activities here .)   But now that I am in 3rd, those ideas don't quite fit with the beginning of the year level of my students.  So with a little tweaking, I was able to make this more "user-friendly" for the 8 year olds.  I did this lesson both in person AND over Zoom with distance learning....so it can be done literally in any situation you might find yourself this year!  Here is what we did. We began the day reading Johnny Appleseed by Steven Kellogg.   (my amazon affiliate link) While we were reading, we discussed the genre of legend and tall tale, noting that within the story there were several instances of exaggeration.  We created a chart listing those th......

This week, we have moved on from human body systems to that of plants.  Vascular plants to be exact (don't I sound so scientific when I say it like that?)  The basic goal of our lessons is to show students that plants have a set of tubes inside of them, very similar to that of the human cardiovascular system, that is responsible for delivering the food, water, and gas necessary for life to each of the cells. First, we started with the celery experiment.  The kids weighed the celery, and made careful note of whether or not there were leaves present.  Then, the celery was placed in a vial with or without water.  After a day, the celery was weighed again, the amount of water left was recorded, and students drew conclusions about how the celery took in water. Basically, the celery in the water wilted a bit, took in red die, but did not weigh any more than it did to begin with, even though there was less water in the vial.  Since we had a control (a vial j......

So last week we were studying the Circulatory and Respiratory systems.  This week, we have moved on to the Digestive system.  (again, thank all that is good we are in life science...I am rockin' out the instruction here ;)  ) Though there is nothing revolutionary to report, these are all simple things that you can do in your own class during your unit. We started with my favorite.....BrainPOP.  The video on the Digestive System has just enough information to give the kids a basic understanding of how it all works.  While they were watching, I had them labeling a little picture of the system in their science journals. During science lab, we modeled the process of digestion.  To do this model, you will need for each student/group of students: 2 baggies cracker tablespoon of water shot glass size of orange juice First, the students placed the cracker into the baggie and started to mash it up with their fingers.  This was the "mouth" part o......

We have begun our unit on living systems in science (thank GOSH because Earth and Physical science have quite literally killed me this year...seriously, I feel like the most incompetent teacher when I teach science...but I digress...).  Our main focus for the past week before Spring Break was the circulatory and respiratory systems.  I thought I would share some of the things we have been doing, in case some of you are in the same unit yourselves. To get us started, we watched a few BrainPO P videos about circulation and blood.  I found these in the HEALTH section, not the science section.   The kids were very enthralled with these videos (they ALWAYS are really)  There was quite a lot of information in them, which got us started on the right foot. The videos mentioned how the circulatory system was the delivery system of the body and that all systems were connected to this one.  After some discussion, the students created this Circulation Data Disk ......