Here’s another idea incorporating charades (for kinesthetic learners), visualizing, and higher level thinking questions. by Stephanie Penniman Snail Investigation Possible questions to draw from the children or have them consider during the investigation: • How do wild animals survive in the city? • What do they eat? Who eats them? • How do they find …
Category: Unit Openers
Third Grade – City Wildlife Unit Openers
My favorite one-stop shop for opening this unit is Cornell University’s Urban Bird Studies web site. All resources are free though they request a donation if they send you materials. This site has films you can watch with your students and asks students to be urban bird watchers in their own community and submit data …
Kindness Unit Openers
Low Level Thinking and Questions What is kindness? Who is kind in the story? Kindness is being nice. Higher Level Thinking and Questions How can we show kindness to people who are in need? How can we get involved in helping people outside our classroom who need help? Why do we need to show kindness …
Virtual Guest Speaker: Videoconferencing Made Easy
Having a guest speaker is a fantastic way to open up your unit. Students get to hear from someone besides you and your guest is probably an expert in the field. However, it is hard to get someone to come to school but it’s easier to get someone to appear virtually via video conferencing for …
How to Plan a Unit Opener
by Mathew Needleman Let’s begin our week of unit opener planning by making sure we’re all on the same page and share a common rationale and understanding of what an effective unit opener is. What is a Unit Opener? A unit opener is the Open Court Reading name for what is commonly known as an …
Unit Opener Planning Week is Coming 10/15
Please join me on the blog for Unit Opener Planning Week, the week of October 15-20, a week spent planning and reflecting on possible unit opener ideas for the next unit. Here’s the schedule for this blog (entries posted at 7:30 AM PST): Monday 10/15 Best Practices for Unit Openers/Anticipatory Sets Tuesday 10/16 Virtual Guest …
Download Youtube Videos
Many districts understandably block Youtube in schools. For this reason you may want to download videos for classroom use. You can do this from http://www.zamzar.com. If you need help doing this. Click on this screen capture from Zamzar where I’ve highlighted what you need to do: Why would you want to do this? The short …
Get Your Students Involved: Service Learning
Reading Founders of the Children’s Rainforest? Approaching the Kindness unit? On the Cooperation or Friendship units? Get your students involved in a service project of their choosing. Do Something.org is a site where ideas are posted for making a difference and students can connect with others around the world to participate in service projects.
Cooperation and Competition Unit Opener
submitted by Denise Caywood 1) Use preview skills to look through the unit ( this like a picture walk for younger learners) and we develop questions from titles and subtitles and list on large chart paper for answering later. 2) Handing off activity: I use a small (beanie baby frog) object to hand off to …
A Game for Teaching Cooperation and Competition
by Francie Kugelman I place the students in groups of 4, with one strong math student in each group. The directions are passed out, along with the two charts the students are to round to the nearest whole number. The students are given the directions and chart paper to write their answers. This project is …