Brrrrr! Arctic Animal Adaptations Gallery!

I am so excited to share the second installment in my Take Home Projects series!
"Design-An-Arctic-Animal Take Home Project"

In my second grade class, we learn about arctic animals and their adaptations. We spend a long time talking about how the animals' bodies have changed to help them survive in their icy, arctic home.  Later in the post I'll explain more about the Arctic Animal Adaptation Sheets that we use!

After building a knowledge base in effective adaptations, I introduce my Design-An-Arctic-Animal Take Home Project! (Click on the pic to be taken to my TPT store to purchase it) The purpose of this packet is to get parents involved in talking with their children about science learning. This packet includes a parent explanation sheet that lays out the project in clear and simple terms. 

Want to check out a different Take Home Project? Click here to go to my post on the Dinosaur Fossil Take Home Project!

A BIG component to the success of these Take Home Projects is successful teacher modelling...

I basically do the whole project in front of the class before I send it home. We talk about each step as we go, I make sure students are fully aware of the expectations, and I answer ALL questions.

The LAST thing that I want, is for my students to go home and say in that whiny voice to mom and dad, "But I don't know what to do!"

For this project, I also had the students set up some of the project before taking them home. My school provides posters so I had the students glue on the title and the paragraph organizer. I stapled a sheet of the adaptation labels to the poster. Then the poster, the parent explanation sheet, and the arctic animal design sheet are all safely tucked into backpacks to take home. 

I like to print these Parent Explanation Sheets in color to make them more "special" and eye-catching!

When the students brought back their projects, I was blown away by their creativity and use of interesting materials! My kids used sequins, pompoms, clay, paint, styrofoam, magazine clippings, fake flower petals, and all kinds of other things. They also did an excellent job using their knowledge of animal adaptations to create an interesting arctic animal!

To showcase all of the amazing student talent and learning, I set up an Arctic Animal Gallery and invited parents to come and see what we had been up to!

Looking for some more arctic themed activities? Check out my Arctic Animal Adaptation Sheet by clicking below!

Digging Up Some Fossil Activities...

What student isn't immediately entranced by the topic of fossils? It brings to mind digging in the dirt, finding amazing things, and dreaming of giant long-dead reptiles...Cool, right?

I usually introduce any new science or social studies topic with a vocabulary foldable. This way any topic specific language is dealt with upfront; this also benefits my students who are still picking up English and probably have never seen some of these words before. 

I mean, would you know the word for paleontologist in Spanish??

(It's paleontologo, btw)

Click here or the picture to grab this spinning Fossil Vocabulary Foldable!

I only give my kids three basic terms for fossils: Fossil, paleontologist, and extinct. Many fossils terms are technical and their little brains explode if I try to give them too many technical definitions at once! The fact that this foldable spins, makes it an instant crowd pleaser with my second graders. If you can find sparkly or gemstone brads to use, then its a real winner!



At my school, we focus on the different types of fossils: true form fossils, trace fossils and cast and mold fossils. For each of these, I designed a little craft to make the definition more memorable. You can see our trace fossil footprint craft above! That product isn't quite ready for unveiling yet, but look out for it in my TPT store soon! To help the kids remember the names of these different types of fossils, I busted out my set of plastic dinos and my ipad and whipped up this cinematic masterpiece! (If you want to check out any of my other educational videos, CLICK HERE to head over to my youtube channel or simply click the videos tab at the top of the page!)

That dino may have some moves, but the clear star here is my cat! 

In a perfect world, I would introduce the topic, do a little bit of learning and then hop on a bus and field trip over to a museum where we could stand, awestruck, in front of real dinosaur bones. Alas, living Guatemala City, there are no dinosaur museums to visit. As a result, I've become very good at persuading scientists from around the world to skype with my class... (Thank you random meteorologist from my hometown!)

This time I managed to find Adam Pritchard, through his website Past Time: A Paleontology Podcast Where the Past is the Key to the Present. Let me tell you, he did an excellent job! He often does skype sessions with classrooms around the world. If you're interested, you can find out more details and contact him by going through his website!

THANK YOU SO MUCH for skyping with us, Adam!

I love getting my kids all fired up about the science and social studies topics that we learn about! (chatting with a real paleontologist is one way to do this) I really love it when they take that enthusiasm home with them; and it makes my day when parents tell me that they got involved researching or talking with their child about the topic!

I try to keep parents updated on the things that we learn in class, and one way that I do this is through Take-Home Projects!!

Introducing the
DINOSAUR FOSSIL TAKE HOME PROJECT!!!

I try to make sure that these projects are simple to complete and don't require too many materials. I also send these home a week and a half or two weeks before I want them to come back. If anything, I want to give families more than enough time to work on together on the project!

Another key aspect of assigning these projects is modeling. The day that I send them home, I basically do the entire project as the students watch. I take them step by step through the entire thing and then save a good chunk of time for questions.

I want these kids to be experts on what they need to do for the project before I send them home!

I also send an email heads-up to all of my parents that project instructions will be making their way home that day.

The key to these Take-Home Projects is the Parent Explanation Sheet. It lays out the project so there is no confusion or frustration at home.

In this packet, I also include a sheet to organize due dates, 2 rubrics (one that I use and an editable version) as well as a class book cover, and the actual project sheets.

For this project, students are researching a dinosaur, filling out an encyclopedia sheet, and finally writing a paragraph about the dinosaur using the information on the encyclopedia sheet. 

We had a looooong talk before I sent it home about how to research, remembering to use introduction and conclusion sentences and MOST IMPORTANTLY writing in your own words. When it came time to turn in projects, I still had a few that I had to have a little conversation with:

"Hmm, do you actually know what the words "theorized", "bipedal", and "biomechanics" mean? Are you sure this is ALL your writing?"

But all-in-all the projects came back great! My students loved the opportunity to talk about, and complete, the project with their parents and the finished products are now hanging with pride on our bulletin board!

Check out some pictures of the finished products below and if your interest was piqued by this Take-Home Project, check it out in my TPT store by clicking the cover picture above or RIGHT HERE! If you download the preview on the TPT page, you can see a mini version of all the sheets in the packet!!

 

Top 3 Things I've Learned While Teaching About Insects!!

When teaching an almost month long unit about insects and keeping a small menagerie of creepy crawlies in the classroom you do tend to learn a few things.... 

Here are the top three things I learned while teaching about insects!

1. Kids are REALLY good at catching insects!

Now this might seem to be an obvious one but, let me tell you, once you've spent an entire free period scrounging around under rocks and in bushes for bugs, you really appreciate it when a pack of enthusiastic children catches 6 at recess time. 

To encourage this habit (and to preserve my planning time and sanity) we made some really simple bug catchers.

This project cost me nothing and the kids were EXTREMELY enthusiastic about it. 

If you aren't sure what tulle is, it's the stuff people make tutus out of. You can pick it up at a craft or fabric store for about a dollar a yard. I had some laying around from an old Halloween costume. 

I was soon inundated with insects. One of the cool things about living abroad is the different types of wildlife that you come across. One of my kids caught this whopper during morning recess!

This is a species of elephant beetle that is indigenous to the Latin American area. (Since I'm in Guatemala, we're smack in the middle of the range of these beetles.) We held onto this guy for two days. They are perfectly safe to hold and we passed him around the circle for those brave enough! (We only had one mini-panic when he tried to fly away.) Below you can see me handing off the bug to one of those brave souls. 

2. Some insects are surprisingly classroom friendly!

We were studying the life cycles of insects so I figured what could be more powerful than actually watching it happen in our classroom? I had never raised insects before so I was taking a leap of faith here. 

Welcome to the second grade insect menagerie!!

As you can see, we have mealworms and crickets. I picked these up from the local pet store. (Some Spanish for you: Crickets are grillos and mealworms are tenebrios. It took me weeks to get those into my head. I used to walk in and ask for insectos penquenos.) These two serve a dual purpose because I can feed them to our class pet, Larry the Leopard Gecko. The kindergartners found the grubs while they were out playing and generously gave them to us. 

If you are thinking of doing insect life cycles in your classroom, I recommend mealworms and here's why:

• Mealworms are the easiest to take care of! Throw them in a container with some oats and a couple pieces of vegetable and they are good to go! 
• They also don't bite, have no interest in escaping, and don't move very quickly.
• Their life cycle has four very distinct stages and it's easy for the students to distinguish between the different stages.  
• Crickets, while they make lovely chirping sounds during class, are Houdinis at escaping and they also make a mess in the cage. 
• And the grubs are just creepy looking.

Grubs!

If you do decide to get some mealworms for your class, here's a good intro video!
Want to watch it bigger? Go to my youtube channel by clicking here!

3. Observations are key!!

My students LOVED looking at the bugs! We observed a few different insects as the hook before really getting into the unit. I created an observation sheet for the students to record what they were seeing. ANNNNNNND lucky for you, it's one of my FREEBIES! Click below to head over to my TPT store and snag it for yourself!

<<<Click here>>>







All throughout the unit we continued to do observations. This is what we did will all of the insects that the students brought in! After we introduced some insect vocabulary the students naturally began using it during the observations.

Here it is in action!!

And those are the top 3 things I learned while teaching about insects! Thanks for reading and I hope you've found something here that will be useful in your own classroom!!