Friday, January 20, 2012

Communities: Past and Present Part 2

So I was really excited about teaching population this week - more so than I ever thought I would be!

After doing a brief oral explanation of what population is (number of people in one place), we talked about the population of our classroom, the school, our county, and even our state! (I had looked up the information beforehand). This tied in so well with our study of graphs and "keys" for our picture graphs! Check out our posters below (I LOVE our school's poster maker!) that were made in Publisher:


I also found a way to display our trioramas from last week (I had been scratching my head, but finally decided our New Year's wish balloons had been up there long enough).




The caterpillars you see are from our "contractions," another pinterest-inspired activity! I'll share more about my "Grammar Tree" in another post! :)

Since it was only a four day week, we spent Tuesday on population (which my students have now expanded to talking about any group of objects in one place....like the population of magnetic coins that don't seem to want to leave my white board!). Wednesday was a cute booklet that had us drawing what things looked like now and then (closely related to a big book we have called
Things Have Changed!). It's one of those great things I inherited years ago, but can't remember from where or who, or I'd share (one of these days, I'd like to get a document scanner and put things in Adobe!).

Thursday we discovered past items and jobs that have since been eliminated using the website What Is It? from Harcourt School, and created "coins" of colonial jobs. I adapted a worksheet from the book below I had picked up in my travels. It's from one of the pages that the students were supposed to "match," but thought making coins would be more fun!


The kids really enjoyed the activity and of course, my boys loved the fact that there was a gunsmith as one of the coins!

Friday was a day where we shared our homework this week: interviewing someone "older" about their childhood, comparing it to today. I thought it was funny because one of the questions was asking which invention had changed their life since childhood. I laughed at one that said "Atari," bringing back memories of my old TI99/4A we had (MUNCHMAN!), but most said cell phone, Internet, or computers. My kids were stunned when I told them that I never had computers in my classroom until middle school!

"Gosh, Mrs. Youel, how old ARE you?"

Some days, I ask myself the same question! :)

2 comments:

Tammy said...

A poster maker? That sounds handy.
Tammy
Forever in First

Mrs. Youel said...

It is the best! You use any 8x11 paper and while it's not in color (black ink), it is VERY handy to have! A friend of mine's school has one where you can laminate the posters (it comes out with carbon on it). Unfortunately, ours cannot and the paper will turn black :( But it's nice write on it, display it, and create a new one the next year.

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