We started using a new resource this week: Freckle. I have used the free version of this website in the past, and I so excited that Cobb has purchased full accounts for each student. Freckle can be easily accessed through Cobb Clever. Just use your Office 365 account to login to Clever, and you're all set for Freckle, too. Freckle has great practice activities, especially fact practice. Fluency with math facts is an incredibly valuable skill as students progress in math. Being able to quickly retrieve math facts from memory helps students move through multi-step math problems efficiently and with accuracy. One great way to keep math skills sharp while we're away from school and over the summer is continued fact practice. Feel free to starting throwing in multiplication and division facts, too! Your child will needs to know those facts as well for 3rd grade. Freckle has more than just math facts, too. It covers math, language arts, science, and social studies skills. So use it for everything! I've posted about Scholastic's Learn at Home series a couple of times during distance learning. Their lessons are just so wonderful that I keep going back for more. Their 3rd & 4th grade daily lessons are great enrichment options, and many are integrated with science topics. I particularly enjoyed the World's Wildest Plants lesson from week 2. Check it out!
This week we are learning about the life cycle of a chicken. As always, I have gotten a lot of questions about this topic from students. The life cycles unit always sparks curiosity in kids. I'd like to share some enrichment resources for these curious kiddos. Here is the video that I shared this week on Zoom. This week, I also shared a link to a great website with more detailed information about the life cycle of a chicken. Click the button below to explore this great resource. The site is great because it is very thorough, includes picture and videos, and has a read to me feature for each page. You can also find articles on this site about the life cycles of other animals. Check out this Mystery Science mini-lesson Why Do Birds Lay Eggs in the Spring. This afternoon I'd like to share one of my favorite YouTube resources: Crash Course Kids. Their quick, standards-based videos explain a wide variety of topics for curious minds. I use their videos as a teaching tool in the classroom. At home, the Crash Course Kids videos can be used for enrichment, down time, or to explain a learning topic further. All of their videos are short and sweet, so kids don't lose focus while watching.
"It’s a natural history epic. It’s a compelling detective story. It’s a scientific adventure at its best. It took Dr. Fred Urquhart almost 40 years to discover the monarch butterflies’ secret hideaway and prove the most incredible migration on Earth. Following the year-long annual migration cycle of the butterflies, the award-winning production team filmed hundreds of millions of monarchs in their remote overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico in 2011 and again in 2012 and also along their migratory routes from Canada, across the U.S. and into Mexico." The Flight of the Butterflies is a wonderful, family-friendly movie that details the butterfly life cycle and monarch migration. I show this movie in my classroom every year during our life cycles unit because it shows the wondrous journey of monarch butterflies so well. This movie would be great for movie night with the whole family or as enrichment for Friday. It is available for streaming on Amazon Prime. The website for the film is filled with wonderful resources and information about monarch butterflies. I highly encourage everyone to check out the movie and the website! As I have mentioned before, Scholastic has introduced a great remote learning series for school closures. I wanted to share this lesson from Week 3 of their Learn at Home lessons. This lesson highlights the life cycles of frogs and butterflies, both of which we have studied recently. The lesson includes literacy activities, games, and puzzles for students to learn more about life cycles.
NASA Kids' Club helps children in pre-K through fourth grade learn the ins and outs of NASA's missions using hands-on educational games. There's also a "Now in Space" slideshow that introduces budding astronauts to the crew currently orbiting Earth on the International Space Station. Cooking is such a valuable life skill. My grandma was a home economics teacher, and she taught me many life skills including cooking and sewing. Both of these skills have proven immensely useful throughout my life, and especially now that I have to stay at home 24/7. My grandparents used to visit every summer for almost the entire break, and during those summers I would help in the kitchen and pick up new skills along the way. Of course, my mom also taught and reinforced cooking skills at home. She wanted me to be able to help with meals at home every day. I really cherish the time I had in the kitchen with my family growing up. I know teaching kids how to help in the kitchen can sometimes be a little stressful and messy, but think of how helpful your child will be once they've mastered the basics of cooking. Most kids are curious about food anyways, and cooking is a great opportunity for STEM at home. We just finished learning about basic fractions in math, which is perfect timing for cooking lessons. Cooking is basically just a big science experiment that results in delicious food, so why not try?
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