Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Human Body/Point of view/Halloween Mash Up

Since it was Halloween my partner teacher and I decided it was the perfect time for a lesson on character's point of view. I entered the classroom as Cinderella and read my story for the children. All of a sudden, the wicked step mother entered and totally took over! My amazing partner teacher read from the point of view of the step mother and had nearly all students convinced that sweet Cinderella was lazy and rude! Awesome!


To get into the Halloween spirit I saw decided to give my door a makeover with something I had found on Pinterest.


While I was at a special my very fun friend decided to give her door a makeover! How fun!!!




My third and fourth graders have been learning about the human body for the past couple of weeks. We have been having loads of fun leaning about our bodies. To try to ease some of the Halloween craziness we planned the day to revolve around some spooktacularly science stations.

Man, it was awesome! We had seven stations that kids rotated through. Each station lasted for roughly ten minutes. There were two teachers (one in each classroom) and thirty-two kids.

Station 1: The Brain! This was a  teacher manned station. When students arrived at the station they found a large bowl filled with cooked spaghetti (brains). In our last read aloud we discovered that the human brain is about the size of our two fists put together. Students picked up two handfuls of spaghetti to get a feel for the size of their brains.  After washing the brains off of their hands they worked through come brainteasers and memory games we had photocopied and left at the station.


Station 2: A Halloween mystery sentence   Each blank space had a picture that matched up with a letter to spell out a mystery sentence. This was more for Halloween fun than human body learning but it definitely could be adapted to fit the human body. If each symbol was a picture of an arm or leg or bone  and the sentence was something human body related this could fit in any time of the year.

Station 3: Human body cut and paste match  At this station students found two pages: one page had lines like a puzzle to cut and the other did not. Both were a picture of a skeleton that had the major bones labeled. Students needed to match the skull of the cut page to the skull of the whole page.

Station 4: Halloween Glyph  This station was part glyph and part word worth. The glyph had a picture of a boy and girl witch and students had to color the picture according to questions they answered on the worksheet. The next page was a word worth page where each letter is worth a coin (quarter, dime, etc.) The words they used were Halloween words but human body vocabulary would work great here.

Station 5: Eyes  At this station kids were able to feel a fresh set of eyeballs (grapes- man it takes a long time to peel those suckers!) After feeling the eyes they were instructed to test their own eyes. An eye exam paper was posted on the board. Students could check to see if they were nearsighted or farsighted as well as if one eye worked better than the other. They also had I Spy books to look at as well as Where's Waldo.




Station 6: Favorite Fall Candy  This station was perfect for my third graders who are starting a unit on data. Students were able to taste test three popular fall candies and choose their favorite to graph as a class.

Station 7: White and Red blood cell  This is quite possibly my favorite station. There were two jobs at the blood cell station. The white blood cell job was to see who could throw more white blood cells (pattern blocks) at the germ (in a text we read earlier in the week we noticed the germ looked like a pizza and we talked about how the white blood cell 'eats' the germ). The red blood cell job was to start at the heart (a paper heart on the floor), pretend to fill up 2 liter bottles with air and then move around the room distributing the air. They then returned to the heart to fill the bottles back up.


Our Halloween/Human Body day was fantastic. Each station had a ticket students had to fill out and bring with them. The ticket had a question related to the station that asked them information that we had talked about earlier in the week. We didn't even have time for all of the activities we had planned. At the end of the day students filled a plastic glove with popcorn and to take it home they had to answer how many bones are in our hands and arms and then attach the tag with the information to the popcorn.

It was a great way to enrich our learning of the human body on a rather hectic day!