| | | | |

Erupting with Science! *Freebies! And Winners!

First of all,


WINNER! YEYAH!

These are the three lovely winners of my 200 follower giveaway!
Natalie from Teacher Tidbits with comment #12
Staci from Let’s Teach Something with comment #33
Misty from Think, Wonder, and Teach with comment #48

I’ll be emailing you ladies so you can choose any two items from my TPT store! 

And on to the new news. 
This is the post I’ve been promising for, like, a month. Our fast changes to the earth unit took forever. This is because I don’t know how to keep things simple. I group as many millions of standards as possible together and teach stuff into the ground. You’re gonna learn the heck about volcanoes! Until forever.

So these are some of the things we did. At the bottom of this post is the product where you can do many of these activities, too, including the writing pieces, and a freebie! So stay tuned, at least till the bottom of the page.

We started off by watching (of course) a Brain Pop and using the basic information there to identify the causes of changes to Earth’s surface. Plate tectonics. The kids had some background knowledge from when they did their whole continents hoopla (you can read about that here), so they at least remembered the terms “continental drift” and “tectonic plates” and “Pangea”.

Then we introduced some of the changes that these shifting plates can cause and recorded them on a foldable about volcanoes, earthquakes, and landslides. This foldable is included in the pack below.

We read several articles about volcanoes, including this one about Pompeii. We practiced identifying important ideas and using context clues.






















Then I thought, “Hey! I have to teach all these poetry standards. Why not do it in a poem about…” you guessed it. Volcanoes!!

So we read a poem from a Safari reader called “Lava and Ash.” we used it to identify stanza, rhyme pattern, rhythm, meter, and poetic language.

We made a poster of all of that here:

We labeled the different characteristics of a poem and identified the main ideas of each stanza.

This is our figurative language foldable. On the outside, there are lines from the poem.

On the inside, we used specific language to talk about
why the poet chose to do different things with language.

I didn’t include the poetry stuff in the pack, because I didn’t think I could use the poem! obviously – I didn’t write it, lol.

THEN, 
nope, still not done yet. never gonna be done with these darn volcanoes and stuff
we did a TON of activities with earthquake and landslide vocabulary and causes and effects. You can see these here, where we glued them onto posters.

Each one includes the title, diagram of a volcano (see freebie below!) most devastating earthquakes chart (included in pack), causes and effects of landslides (a different version is in the pack) earthquake vocabulary foldable (included in pack) and types of volcanoes foldable (a different version of this is included in the pack; it’s a chart instead of a foldable).

Earthquake vocabulary foldable

Types of volcanoes foldable
Not done yet! I still had to stretch it into a three-week-long writing project! So, here’s what we did. We started out by charting the positive and negative language used to describe volcanoes. This is what we noticed through our wide reading and video watching.
 Then students had to decide: do volcanoes save the world or destroy the world? We planned out our writing using this graphic organizer
This is also included in the Science Pack at TPT or Teacher’s Notebook.
After we planned, I noticed some students were having difficulty staying focused within their paragraphs. Some of their paragraphs were also redundant, or repeated. So I had them cut and glue to reorganize based on main ideas. It helped. 
This is what that looked like:
First draft writing is never pretty. We cut a sentence at a time and marked their main ideas in a color so they could make sure they were connected.
They drafted, revised again, using STAR revision (see post here) and edited.
Then we published! This writing project is all included in my Science Pack.
After that, I had my lovely intern stick it all up on the wall in the hallway with the creative *sarcastic* title “Volcano World” that I came up with. Let’s just say that by then, I was kind of done.
She did, however, make it more creative than I would have by making the letters look all lava-y. I can only imagine how much time that took.
The kids had a blast 
no pun intended
well, yeah, I guess it was a little intended
once I realized it was a pun
and you can do a lot of these activities, too! 
Just grab my Fast Changes to the Earth Science Pack at TPT or Teacher’s Notebook!
At least grab the freebies at TPT. Both pages are part of the same document. Leave me some love, here or there!

Pin It

Share:

Similar Posts

4 Comments

  4. Hey girl! Sorry I haven't gotten back to you on the items I want yet. You have soooo many, and I want to make sure I get just the right ones! Promise I will let you know soon…right now, I'm having toooo much fun in Japan 🙂

    Natalie
    TeacheryTidbits

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *