Author: Jack Taylor

This lesson is designed for 4th grade social studies.

Instructions

For this assignment, students will first spend free time throughout multiple class sessions reading through pamphlets around the world, each about different landmarks around the globe. Students will then decide one to research on, and will create a poster about their landmark. The poster should say where the landmark is located, should be full of plenty of facts, and should have some interesting pieces of trivia as well. Students are also welcome to draw and color their landmarks as well on the poster.

Then, students will be split into two groups at random. Afterwards, they will need to open their computers, open the pre-made Google My Maps, and will place a pin on the location they created their poster on, with the color of their pin showing which group they are in. Then, students will be split into two groups. Students will then write down questions they have for the landmarks labeled by the opposite group. Finally, the two groups will switch off, with one group starting by standing near their poster and presenting their info on it, while the other group walks around the room, asking questions about the landmarks and taking notes. Afterwards the two groups will switch, and the lesson will end with a quick write up about a few interesting facts they learned.

Instructional goal

This lesson is designed to help students improve at important skills such as researching a specific topic, choosing necessary and important info, writing critical questions, and presenting the information they have learned. The Google My Maps tool will help students get a good visual as to where in the world certain landmarks are, and also will help them gain perspective as to how far apart they are.

By Jack Taylor & Jenna Rappaport

Grade: 3

Introduction to a unit on the water cycle.

Goal: for students to understand condensation, precipitation, and evaporation. This site helps students by providing defintions, examples, and visuals.

Featured Image: Clipart

This lesson is designed for a 3rd grade social studies class. For this lesson, students will get in groups of 2-4 and create a shared map on Google Mymaps. Then, they will make markers to indicate certain historical landmarks, national parks, interesting cities, or anything else of note within the United States. Once they are done, they will take time to look through all the points that their group members made as well.

After this, they will choose one location that interests them (it can be one that they found or that their group members found) and they will create an informational poster about it. This can be done on paper, or on any site that lets you make posters or brochures. Afterwards, they will share their location to the class and will also share at least one interesting fact they found about it.

The goal for this lesson is to introduce students to researching and presenting on a topic of their choice. The map allows students to not only get a better visual understanding of how the United States is spaced out, but it also allows students to collaborate with each other, and it gives them the chance to share their ideas both with their small groups and with the entire class. I also wanted to give the students freedom as to how they choose to record and present their information to the group, since this sort of a research assignment could be a very new concept to them.

Context of the Activity

This lesson is designed for a fourth grade class who has already had some experience with working with and understanding typical plot structures in literature. Students will have already read a fable as a class and discussed where certain plot structures show up within the story. At the start of the lesson, they will watch an Edpuzzle video that reviews plot structure.

Instructions

The students will begin by watching the Edpuzzle and answering the questions integrated in the video. Afterwards the class will have a discussion about the different questions. Then, the teacher will pass out a worksheet which has a clear visual that represents a typical plot diagram, with blank spaces next to key moments on the diagram. They will then fill in key moments from the story that relate to each spot on the graph (setting, rising action, climax, falling action, etc.). Having a clear visual to show them the literal rising and falling action will be much more useful than simply having them write out the order of events in the story.

Link to Edpuzzle if embed isn’t working: https://edpuzzle.com/media/623b6ff4d66b484291e9959d

Background

This assessment will be taken at the end of the day after students learn the properties of a number line. While taking this assessment, they will have access to a paper copy of a number line, as well as cut out circles that they can use to move along their number line back and forth. The quiz has both multiple choice and written response questions, as well as a quick review at the beginning and a question at the end that will get students thinking about topics that will be covered in the next lesson.

Isabella Horning and Jack Taylor

At the end of this lesson, students will be able to identify words with the starting sounds from the letters Bb, Dd, Gg, and Jj. This is based off the kindergarten common standards:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2
Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes).

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.D
Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words.¹ (This does not include CVCs ending with /l/, /r/, or /x/.)

“Hello friends! Today we are going to practice our letter sounds for the letters b, d, g, and j. I want everyone to open up their iPads to the SeeSaw app. Push that lightbulb button and you will see an assignment for today. Click on the image for the assignment and it should open up Jamboard! Once your screen looks like mine, put your pencil over your head.

Okay class, lets look at this first slide together. What letter is at the top? A, thats right! What sound does the letter A make? aaaa like apple! Nice job! What pictures do you all see on this slide?

Excellent job! Now notice how all the pictures, drawings, and words start with the aaa sound. I want you all to hit the arrow at the top and flip to the next slide. Now there are two letters! What letters do you see? Thats right! What sound does the letter Bb spell? Good and what sound does the letter Dd spell? Okay I want everyone to put on their thinking caps and think of words that start with those two sounds. Once you have an idea, you can draw it, write it, or find a picture of it and add it to a spot on the Jamboard under the letter it starts with.

Now remember, Jamboard is a learning tool, so we don’t use it to draw silly pictures or to mess with our friends ideas, we are responsible with it or we lose out on the ability to use it.

Once you’re done with Bb and Dd, hit that top arrow again and do the same thing with Gg and Jj. Put your pencil over your head when you’re all finished and we’ll look at all our classmates ideas together!”

For the teacher: If students are struggling to come up with ideas, prompt them to think about categories (“what are some foods you like? animals? etc.). Once students are finished, go through each letter section together as a class, verifying answers and showing different examples. If a student makes a mistake, frame it as a learning opportunity and have the class discover which sound that example word begins with. For example: oops, caterpillar does not begin with Dd, class can anyone fond which letter it does begin with?

This lesson utilizes individual student iPads to give every student a chance to contribute to the project. Seesaw is used as an organizational tool to make it easy for kindergarten students to access the Jam board through an app they’re already familiar with. Jamboard makes phonologic awareness fun and exciting for students, giving them a chance to draw, write, and find pictures.

I am from
I am from Texas and the Pacific Northwest
I am from a life full of love for music
I am from a home full of storytellers
I am from long walks and sunsets
I am from theater
I am from a fascination of the ocean and the sky
I am from a pet-friendly home
I am from blue skies and billowing clouds
More than anything, I am from family.

I had a lot of fun messing around with adobe express. It’s very simple to use and user friendly while still allowing lots of room for creative freedom. I also love the simplistic nature of it, as it is not only easy to create a slideshow, but sharing and viewing them are also quite simple. I think this would be a great site for students to combine text, pictures, and videos in a way that is more aesthetically pleasing than your traditional slideshow presentation.

In this assignment, students will choose a character from a book the class is reading together, or from a book they have been reading on their own. They will then fill in each bubble on the character map slowly, thinking about the ways their character acts and how it affects those around them. If the students are using this template to write about a character from a book the class is reading together, then the teacher can also add time after students are done to let them share with each other. This gives them another way to think about a character’s impact on others, since it lets them think about how their classmates perceive the character. It’s important to emphasize the importance of explaining why you have specific opinions about a character, and to tell the students to try to think about specific moments in the book that helped them form their opinion about the character.

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1TPb9w1EFZ0knAs7WEG8MVFBBYfLniGPSktOupiW1oQk/edit?usp=sharing

This assignment is geared towards 3rd/4th grade, with the goal of having students think critically about a character of their choice from a book that the class is reading together, or reading on their own. This will not only help the student develop critical thinking, but it will also push them to think about how people’s actions have direct impacts on other people, which will help them build crucial social awareness skills. The more they think about how they might perceive a character, how the character thinks about themselves, and how other people might think about the character, the more they will be able to apply that logic into their own lives.

Alright 2nd graders, today we are going to be doing a collaborative assignment, where you will get to work with your table groups on Jamboard! As you know, we’ve been reviewing how to count coins, as it is really useful for when you need to buy something, or when you’re getting change back after a purchase. Remember from yesterday, pennies are worth 1 cent, nickels are worth 5 cents, dimes are worth 10 cents, and quarters are worth 25 cents. If you don’t remember which coin is which, be sure to ask your table group or myself. Now, let’s have everyone open up the Jamboard link that corresponds to your table number!

Jamboard Link: Group 1

Slide 1

For this first slide, count up each of the four groups of coins, and write down that number in a new sticky note below each group, or just edit the existing sticky note under each group. Do this work individually, but if you get stuck, ask your table partners for help first.

Slide 2

For the second slide, you may now work with your group to figure out how many coins you can put into each of the four sections, to match the given price tag. Remember, there are many correct answers for each price tag! Feel free to duplicate the coins, but only if you have run out of coins to use.

Slide 3

This final slide is similar to the last slide you did, except this time, you will be finding three different ways to represent 39¢.

Teacher instructions: Make sure to have a backup copy! If something happens to one of the Jamboards that the students are editing, you can simply copy the original again and send them the link to it. If you notice that a student tends to only use the same 2 or 3 types of coins, encourage them to use all 4.

Goals: This second grade math lesson is intended for students who have already had practice identifying coins, and who have at least some experience using them to match certain prices. The Jamboard is a useful tool in this lesson as it allows the students to use an interactive, visual representation of the math concepts they’re using, in a collaborative environment where they can get feedback from their peers. Each of the three slides challenges them to think about this topic in different formats, without straying from the intended purpose of the lesson.

Years ago, I was estatic to start to use social media. Specifically, I began using both Snapchat and Instagram while in middle school, and it was a really fun way for me to keep up with classmates outside of school. I found mostly positives, and very little negatives at the time. How great is it that you can instantly get quick snapshots and updates about your friends lives? It provides great talking points, and makes it so easy to stay connected with those, especially with people who are far away. But is social media really worth it? What makes it different from simply texting each other?

The first thing I started to notice was how easy it was to scroll, and scroll, and scroll. Instagram, for example, lets you follow as many accounts as you please, so you only view the posts of a specific amount of people. However, if you run out of posts, it will start recommending you an endless amount of posts from public accounts. I still find it difficult for myself to stop endlessly scrolling, especially once I’m invested in multiple apps. Even apps like Snapchat, which were initially focused solely on messaging, quickly ventured on to advertising public profiles to view, original shows, etc.

Even apps like YouTube have started to venture more and more into the same territory that other social media platforms. Similar to Snapchat, it started out with humble beginnings. It was a platform for users to quickly upload and share their own videos. Of course, once you’re done watching a video, the fun doesn’t end there. Then you get recommended an entire grid of videos based off what you just watched, you get personalized ads tailored to what you’ve been searching for, and as of recently, they even add Youtube Shorts. This feature makes it so you don’t even have to watch full length videos or click on a new video, they’re just short clips that play endlessly. It took me a long time to figure it out, but slowly I started to realize that it is the developer’s job to keep you engaged, to keep you scrolling, and to keep your attention solely on their app. The more and more features that developers add to their apps only emphasize this idea.

As a child, I loved video games. How is this different from social media? While I do think that addiction to both social media and video games can be a real problem, I think games have had a much more positive impact on my life than social media has. Social media, in the end, isn’t too impressionable on our memories. I started to realize this when one day after scrolling through Instagram for over half an hour, I realized that I barely remembered any specific thing I saw, and it didn’t really cause my any significant joy. It was merely just a vice to pass the time. However, as a child playing video games, whether by myself or with family/friends, it was a concentrated effort. I was focused on a challenge, or exploring a fantastical world, or something that provoked some part of my imagination. Also, games brought me closer together with many friends I met at school. My parents made sure I only played video games a very limited amount of time in the day, so it didn’t impede on my schoolwork, extracurriculars, or my time spent with friends.

I feel lucky that I grew up with video game consoles, rather than growing up with a tablet. I have seen some parents who allow their children hours to browse apps like YouTube Kids, which functions very closely to social media. It’s one thing to have apps like these waste the time of adults, but it’s a whole different thing for someone to get addicted to scrolling through mostly meaningless information when they’re just a kid. In the end, I think social media is fine in moderation, and when whoever is using it understands how the app is using their information and personal preferences to entice them to continue browsing their platform. I continue to use it, but over the years I’ve become much more aware of how it’s impacting me, and if there are better uses for my time.

Welcome third graders! Today, we’re going to go over a brief overview of the water cycle. The water cycle is something that isn’t always obvious to us, but it’s been a constant cycle that has happened on this planet since the oceans began to form, billions of years ago! That’s long before any life at all was on Earth. In fact, life itself wouldn’t even be possible without water! But before we get into that, let’s talk about the basic stages of the water cycle.

The first thing to understand is that in a cycle, there is no first step! The events in this cycle happen continuously, with no beginning or end, just like how a circle has clear beginning or end.

Evaporation

To begin, let’s talk about evaporation. Evaporation is when heat from the sun causes particles in water in the ground to heat up and move so fast, that they then transform into a vapor. The vapor then slowly rises to the sky. This process is almost always invisible while it’s happening, but it explains how puddles on the ground dissapear without you seeing them. The reason large bodies of water don’t evaporate is because the process of evaporation is slow, and bodies of water (such as lakes or oceans) have massive amounts of water in them!

Condensation

The next step is condensation. During this step, the vapor that has traveled to the air cools down and forms back into a liquid. This is actually the process that creates clouds! You can also observe this process at your own home. If you have a glass of cold water on a very hot day, you may notice the outside of the glass begin to notice water forming on the outside of the glass, even if the glass hasn’t spilled at all. The warm water molecules in the air (as a vapor) come in contact with the cold liquid in the can, causing condensation. You can also observe it in the car! If it’s cold outside but the car is very warm inside, the warmer molecules colide with the colder ones, forming condensation on the windows. That warmer air molecules come from our breath and our body heat.

Precipitation

The next step is precipitation. You may have heard this word before in weather reports. This process refers to when so much water has condensed in the clouds, that the clouds can no longer hold it anymore, and so it releases it as rain. However, it can also release the water in other ways can you think of any? (Hint: what if it is a really cold day, when the temperature is below freezing)? If you guessed snow or hail, you’re right! This is also a part of precipitation.

Collection

The last step we have is collection. During collection, the water falls from clouds (whether as rain, snow, hail, etc.), and collects in the Earth’s oceans, lakes, streams, rivers, and even in the ground. But remember, since this is a cycle, the process doesn’t end here! After all, once the water collects itself back on the earth, it is simply ready to begin the process of evaporation, which is the first step we talked about today! This means that the water we drink, the water we see in bodies of water, the rain we see, all of it, has been around on Earth for billions of years. There is barely any water that hasn’t been around that long, and that’s water that’s created through chemical reactions, but that will be a topic for next time. Great job today!