Mrs. Edmunds Class: Science Projects, A Spooky Narrative and Edible Math

So life's been a little busy, as of lately.... Hence the lack in blogging.

My Great Aunt past away last weekend, amongst my sisters 1/2 marathon race and our Canadian Thanksgiving festivities. She was 94 years of age, but extremely spry and 'with it', which makes the loss harder sometimes. Nevertheless, her immense faith in God gave her the strength to prepare for her last few days and carry her through. We shared a beautiful goodbye with her.

The craziness this weekend has continued, as I am getting a head start writing in between my cousin's wedding and reception right now, trying to regain my heat, as it was an outdoor ceremony! Yikes! The high today is 50F! And if you know me, it might as well be snowing at that temp! Haha.....

Oh yes.... and I am just over 6 months pregnant with my first baby, so there's that! Hehe. A wee bit tuckered out :)

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Oh ya.... and there's teaching! Here's a few snapshots and activities from the past 2 weeks.

In math, my students are working on Data Management.

Amongst many mini-lessons, here are two that my kiddos really enjoyed.

With our dear Detroit Tiger's Season coming to an end, we decided to analyze how much team payroll affected team wins in the 2014/15 season. Using a scatter plot, we had many fascinating discussions about rankings and cost per wins and if it's all worth it in the end.

Each student was provided with an MLB sheet (the one below).

Together, we plotted Teams Wins vs. Team Payroll. Nothing fancy, but we it made it's point. Hehe.

Another easy, but uber fun activity was the Oreo stacking competition I held this week.

This was a summary/end of the unit review activity, which looked at many aspects of our unit on Data Management.

Here's how it worked: I chose 10 students' names out of a bag

(five grade 6's and five grade 7's).

Each of the students were given 30's seconds to stack as many Oreo's as possible. Only one Oreo was allowed in each hand at a time.

We then recorded the data. Each grade was provided questions to answer and analyze.

The students were extremely engaged and it was a great review of key concepts. We also were able to discuss inferences and connections to data such as grade, age, gender, strategy etc.

As noted in my last blog post, my grade 6's created one of the 5 Kingdom Diorama's and my 7's created an ecosystem in a bottle. Both grades were provided a checklist with expectations, as well as a list of goals. The students presented their projects this past week. It was great to see how the grade 6 curriculum and the grade 7 curriculum begin to intertwine.

This week, the students will have their projects and write ups on display and each student will be given  a mini-quiz on what they have learned and be asked to take these ideas one step further.

Last but not least, in Literacy, we have been working on Narratives and its text features. If you have been following our blog, you know that I love using the 3:15 app on the iPad.

This past week I played the story "Buried Treasure" (one of the free books on this app) for my kiddos. We used our Narrative graphic organizer to analyze and discuss the text and it's features in more detail. You can grab this organizer HERE.

My goal is to lead into "Suspense Stories" this week and next as we near Halloween. I have a few cute writing activities that I will share in the next post for the week of Halloween, as well as a great anchor chart to use in the classroom.

Tomorrow I am hosting "Coffee House Summary Sampler" in my room. I will have more details on this and some pics up in my next post.

Have a great, Sunday and a wonderful week ahead.



~Kaitlin~