Standard Four: Multiple Instructional Strategies
The teacher understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage students' development of critical thinking, problem solving, and performance skills.
Globe for Animal Cell Vocabulary
During my time in 5th grade, we were preparing our students for the science ISAT. In order to do this the four teachers, each took a topic that was on the standards and taught it a total of four times, each period being a week long. The topic I was given was animal cells. I had a week, which included only about a total of an hour and half to teach the important material. I wanted to create an hands on activity that the students would like to do, instead of just worksheets. So I created a globe that on each of the sections of the globe, was the part of the animal cell, information, and then a picture of the part. We used this as an review for our final test, which showed great success based upon their scores.
Cooperative Class Paragraph
After students read the story, Messages by the Mile, they created sentences in their groups to help create our class paragraph. I create a topic sentence for the students, then they create the following sentences to help complete our paragraph. Students brainstorm and discuss what their sentence should be, when they have decided then they are given a strip to write their sentence out on. Each group has a different color, in which, they must write there sentence in. After all groups have put up their sentences, then we read it aloud. We edit and revise the sentences, moving around the order in which they may go in. Students are given time to discuss amongst themselves what should be fixed before we discuss together. This is a whole class effort and the students love doing it. It helps us practice the 6 writing traits in an interactive way. After the paragraph is completed, students then write the paragraph on their own.
Egg Drop
Our 4th grade class at Van Buren Elementary explored science with a hands-on egg drop a few weeks ago. Students created their own contraption to help a raw egg survive a drop from the roof of the school. Our custodian, dropped each one as the students eagerly watched below. There were smiles and learning to be had for all. Students kept tally of how many eggs survived and did several math and science extensions in class after "The Great Egg Drop".