Easter, Eggs, and Oviparous Animals

Hi everyone! As Easter closes in on us, I wanted to share some of the egg-themed projects and activities I did with my class last year.

I love to celebrate holidays with my class, but it is also a good chance to use their excitement about Easter to get them to do some academic activities. I usually use this time of year as a chance to teach my students about oviparous animals. (The word "oviparous," by the way, refers to animals that lay eggs. My kids are always fascinated to learn this new word. Even many of the teachers I work with don't know what it means!) Each of my students did some research on a different oviparous animal. We learned so many interesting things!

I also created some academic activities using plastic Easter eggs. To create one of these games, I opened up a bunch of plastic eggs, and wrote a single digit number on each egg half. We use Touch Math, so I added the Touch Points to the numbers. My first and second graders who are practicing single digit addition had to choose two halves (they didn't have to match... the kids could be creative with their colors), put them together, and then add the numbers up. Once they got pretty good at that, I added another step by giving them a container of pennies. They then had to add the two halves up, and put that number of pennies inside the egg.

The halves of the eggs.

Putting two eggs together. 

Teal demonstrating how to do the activity. They also had a recording sheet where they wrote down the numbers on the egg halves they put together. 

I didn't take a picture of the next activity, but for my 3rd, 4th and 5th graders who are learning to count money, I put different amounts of coins into 12 plastic eggs. Then I took a muffin tin and put a round sticker, with a coin amount written on it, in each section of the tin. The students had to open up each egg, count the coins inside, and place the egg into the muffin tin compartment with the matching sticker. 

All of the students did some version of the next activity, which I created 3 levels of to differentiate it. (I bought a ton of plastic eggs from the Dollar Tree!) I just hid sight words inside the plastic eggs. The students had to open the eggs, read the words, and then color the matching words on their recording sheets. Towards the end of the week, I made the activity more exciting by putting Easter and spring themed stickers and small erasers into the eggs along with the words. The students could keep the prizes they found as they did their work! 

Noddy and Martin are demonstrating the sight word egg activity. 

We also dissected an egg. Actually, I dissected it while they watched. I explained to them that the eggs you buy in a grocery store never had a baby chick in them. (I remember thinking, as a child, that the yolk was a dead baby chick. It turns out that a lot of my students also believe that!) However, although there are no baby chicks occupying the eggs we eat, all of the parts of an egg are designed to care for and protect a hypothetical baby chick that could have been inside it. We looked at the shell of the egg with a magnifying glass, and talked about the purpose of the shell. (The students hypothesized that the shell is meant to keep the egg clean so you can eat it. We learned that it is also to protect the chick.) I scraped the shell with a thumb tack to reveal the membrane, which looks a little like a thin plastic bag and also helps to protect the chick. When I cracked open the egg, we learned that the egg white and egg yolk provide nutrition for the baby chick when it is inside the egg. We were able to see the chalazae, which are two cords or strings that connect the yolk to the inside of the eggshell to keep it stable. (I compared it to the yolk having two arms that it uses to hang onto the inside of the shell so it doesn't fall.) We even managed to see the blastodisc, which is a little spot that, if the egg was fertilized, would develop into a chick fetus. 

The students were fascinated by this activity. They love science. I wish we had time to do more of it. But their favorite part of the activity was when I let them stick their hands into the raw egg and play with it for a while. (I warned them very strictly that they weren't to eat the egg or lick their fingers, and if they did, they'd be done with the activity immediately... and I made them wash their hands afterwards. They were cooperative with these guidelines because the chance to have a sensory experience with a raw egg was so exciting!) 

Teal playing with the raw egg. 

It was a fun unit! I think we all learned a lot! I will be adding more activities to my Easter/egg/oviparous animal unit this year as well. 

How Is It Almost May Already?

Sometimes being a special ed teacher is exhausting! 

It is that time of year where, on one hand, I can't believe the year has gone by so fast, and on the other hand, each week seems to crawl by at a snail's pace. I haven't had the energy to write in this blog lately.

One of the things I have been dealing with is that one of my students (Towhee) has such severe behavioral issues that he now has to be taught in a separate room, with not one but two paras with him. It has been very frustrating because they gave us a 1:1 para for him, but he requires 2 people with him, and at least one of them needs to be trained in CPI (crisis de-escalation and restraint). This has meant restructuring our entire classroom lives so that Towhee can have the majority of our time, energy and resources, while the rest of my students get whatever is left over. Before Towhee was given a 1:1 and before the special ed director moved him into his own tiny classroom, it was even worse, because the expectation was for me to work 1:1 with Towhee in the empty classroom next door all day long, while the paras just ran the rest of the classroom on their own.  I do love Towhee, but it is just frustrating that it is always the students with the most severe behaviors that take priority over everything else. Last year when I worked in a different school, my classroom was similarly hijacked when the special ed director there decided that the 23 students on my caseload would get to work with a different random substitute teacher in another room every day for the rest of the school year, while I devoted all of my time to two students with severe behavioral issues, one of whom actually punched out a screen and jumped out the window and another who regularly busted holes in the walls and the bathroom door. My other kids made zero progress because they couldn't even have a steady teacher or para... just a string of subs... while my whole job was just to contain these two kids who weren't even allowed to leave the room to go to specials because their behavior had become so unsafe. I didn't get lunches or planning time that school year... I was expected to sit and eat lunch with the students, because they couldn't go to the cafeteria. So at least this Towhee situation is a little better than that. But still. I feel bad for all of my other students (last year and this year) who also have special needs, who really require structure and stability and consistent instruction, whom we struggle just to figure out how to serve because we are so busy directing most of our time and attention towards the kids with behavioral issues... in this case, Towhee. There have been days when I've had to send some of my students to their gen ed classes, literally to be babysat (they just brought some worksheets to do or books to read while they were there) because I didn't have enough staff to supervise them in the classroom. I didn't even have enough staff to have a human being in the classroom with them, let alone enough staff to actually teach them their reading lesson!

But I digress...

I think next year is going to be a lot better. I will have a much better idea of what I am doing, and I will have the whole summer to get my classroom organized and ready, instead of just a few weeks like I had this year. I sort of wish I could fast forward through the rest of this school year so I could get a fresh start!

At any rate, I have three new games I made using Widgit online, and I am sharing them for free at TPT. The first two are train-themed  CVC reading games.  Both involve simply rolling a die, moving around a train track, and reading CVC words.

Regular "Go Train Go" has CVC words with pictures.

Level 2 Go Train GO has CVC words without pictures.

The next game is a money game with a rainforest game. To play, you roll a die, move around the board, and collect coins. (The coins have Touch Points on it because that is how my students are learning money, but you don't have to know Touch Points to benefit from the game.) If you land on a rainforest animal, you can adopt it for 50¢.  If you land on the stop sign, you have to donate 10¢ to the cause, and put that money in the middle of the board. If you land on a present, you get any of the money that is in the middle of the board. The winner is the person who adopts the most animals. Like Monopoly, this game can go on forever. My 3rd graders, Noddy and Martin, have actually begged to play it every day at math time, so we've been writing down how much money and which animals each player has at the end of each math session so that we can pick the game up again the next day. This game has really given them a lot of practice at counting coins and spending money, and has also been a great way for me to assess their progress. And you can have it for free! It is called Save the Rainforest Touch Money Game. I hope you like it!

I will try to update more regularly if I can. Thanks for reading, everyone!

Two Simple Chinese New Year Activities

Hi everyone! I hope you are all doing well! In my little class we had an exciting week! We started out celebrating Valentine's Day and the 100th Day. (We ended up with a snow day on the actual 100th Day/Valentine's Day. Where we live, they shut down the town if we get one snowflake!) Then on Friday we did some Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year) activities. 

I am not completely sure how Lunar New Year works. I know that it lasts for 23 days, but I am not sure if Friday was the first day or the last day. I am pretty sure it is the first day, which means you still have time to use these activities if you'd like to. If its the last day. then maybe you can remember these activities for next year!

Anyways, I enjoy celebrating different cultures, and incorporating cultural holidays into our learning. Someday remind me to tell you about the Sight Word Dreidel game I made! For now, the first thing I'd like to show you is two different versions of our Yut Nori game. 

Yut Nori is a board game traditionally played in Korea, especially during Korean New Year, which is less well known than Chinese New Year but falls at the same time and is based on the Lunar calendar. I first learned about it when I was a caregiver for a child who was part Korean, and I wanted to help her and her siblings embrace her culture. I've heard that it can actually be as complicated as chess. If you want to learn more about the actual game, this website is a good place to start. It actually seems kind of similar to "Sorry." 

I simplified it quite a bit for my little friends, to benefit our varying amounts of time available and their short attention spans. I decided to use the game for math. I made two different versions. For the first, second and third graders, who are working on Touch Math Addition, I made a Touch Math Addition game. All I did was draw the game board on a poster board, write a Touch Math addition problem in each circle, and decorate one side of 4 craft sticks. (It is important to only decorate one side of each stick, and leave the other side blank.) 

The fifth graders are working on Touch Money, so I made a Touch Money Yut Nori for them. I wasn't sure how to make this, since I can't really just draw realistic looking coins. We have a huge tub full of fake coins that have come with various math curriculum kits over the years, so I decided to use those. I used a Sharpie to add the Touch Points to all of the coins, and then I hot glued them to the board. 

Here is how we played it. Each player puts their token in the blank circle in the bottom left corner. When it is your turn, you throw the four sticks into the air. (When I taught them this I was sure to show them the correct way to toss the sticks gently onto the game board instead of whipping them across the room!) If just one stick falls with the decorated side up, you go one space. If two, three or four sticks fall with the decorated side up, that is the number of spaces you go. If all four sticks fall with the blank side up, you go five spaces! The students had to solve the math problem on the space in order to stay there. 

Some people play the game using the rule that if you land on a space where another player already is, that player has to go back to start. For my kids this would cause a lot of tantrums. Good sportsmanship definitely needs to be addressed, but during math time my goal is for all of the students to actually do the math activity for as long as possible, so I changed the rule a little... if you land on a spot where another player already is, that player goes back one step. Going back one step is a lot easier for my kids to cope with than going all the way back to start, and we are more likely to keep everyone playing the game instead of having to stop and discuss the unfairness of it all. 

If a player lands on one of the spaces that leads to a path going across the board, they can take the short cut. The winner is the player who can get back to start first. 

The kids all enjoyed playing this game, and even requested to play it during their Independent Work time. I'd say that is a success! They also concentrated and paid attention the entire time. I was even able to get the third graders to circle the first number of each addition problem while saying the number, and then "count on" with the second number. (Usually they insist on counting every single dot on both numbers. No matter how we do math... using manipulatives, Touch Points, tallies, our fingers, etc... they really struggle with the concept of counting on.) I'd say it was a successful lesson!

During writing, we wrote about our New Year wishes. I explained how it was a little different from the New Year's resolutions we wrote about in January, because those were about improving ourselves and these were going to be about making a wish. The little kids just had to dictate and copy one sentence about their wish. The third and fifth graders had to write an opening sentence about their wish, three details, and a closing sentence. (The third graders mostly dictated and copied. The fifth graders had to at least try to write as independently as possible, although they need lots of help with spelling.) Each of them also drew a picture to illustrate their wish. We glued the pictures and paragraphs onto sheets of red construction paper. 

I also went to this site, where you can look up the Chinese symbols for your name. I looked each of the students' names up, copied and pasted them into a document, and printed them out. The students glued these to the tops of their papers. I added a gold string to hang them by. I wish we could have hung them outside, but it is cold and rainy here. So we hung them in the hallway instead. I think they look pretty cool! (By the way, you may notice that this writer claims that cats play video games. I was a little confused because he was actually wishing to have a cat. I asked him if he already had a cat and was wishing for another one, but he said that he didn't have a cat yet. Then one minute later he told me that his cat could play video games. I'm not sure if the video-game playing cat is the one he is wishing for or if he actually has a cat who can play video games. Remind me to ask him later.)

I hope you liked these two Chinese New Year ideas! Next week we'll be doing some President's Day activities and then delving into Black History. Check back soon!