Summer Superheroes (Reblog)

This week, I am focusing on providing resources to “Squash the Summer Slide” as ReadWriteThink puts it.  Parents often ask me at this time of year for ideas to keep my students challenged over the summer, and here is one that would be great for students who enjoy writing.  

Summer Superheroes is a “Parent & After School Resource” on ReadWriteThink.  It offers an interesting twist to the concept of creating your own superhero by challenging the author to invent a superhero whose powers are somehow dependent on the warmest season of the year.  The detailed instructions for motivating the child and for helping him or her to develop the story include interactive resources on the ReadWriteThink site.  This would be a fun idea to share with parents, or to use in the last month of school – when everyone’s mind is on summer anyway!

More Aurasma Ideas – Great for the End of the Year!

Vist Smarticles to find out how to trigger the Aurasma overlay on this business card!

Mary Howard at “Your Smarticles” posted an awesome list of ways that you can use the Aurasma app in your classroom.  For those of you new to Aurasma, I like to describe it as QR codes on steroids.  However, any image can be the trigger – not just unattractive codes.  I was impressed with Mary’s creative ideas, and I was even more impressed by the huge Aurasma Scavenger Hunt Mystery Person Silhouettes package that I downloaded from her Teachers Pay Teachers store.  It is $5.00, but so well worth it!  She has put a LOT of work into this download, and all you have to do is choose where to post the mysteries and make sure you subscribe to her Aurasma channel.  Your students will love you for giving them this fun activity at the end of the year!

You can visit one of my posts, or this post on “Thrasymakos” to learn more about using the free Aurasma app.

Dance By Number

How can you engage your students in a lesson about patterns, while making sure they use the scientific process, graph their data, analyze their data, and make accurate predictions based on that data?  By incorporating dance, of course!  ”Dance By Number“, a lesson that can be found at Stem4Teachers, is guaranteed to make your classroom noisy and chaotic for a few days – but also guarantees that your students will be active in their own learning.  The website has a good video that describes the process and shows it in action.  It also provides the lesson plan, student sheets, and teacher tools (which includes rubrics).  In addition to the enthusiastic involvement of the students, this lesson makes differentiation easy; students can adjust their own levels of learning by creating patterns that reflect their abilities.  It’s been awhile since I’ve mentioned Universal Design for Learning on this blog, but I definitely think this lesson fits the bill.

Gridworks

In yesterday’s post, I stated that I would publish a post about the Vi Hart videos today.  However, I forgot that it is Friday.  Now, that my “Gifts for the Gifted” series is over until next holiday season, I would like to return to my Fun Friday posts.  So, I will “post”pone my Vi Hart post until Monday.

Several years ago, I purchased a book called GridWorks by ThinkFun.  It doesn’t look like ThinkFun still sells this book (although you can buy it for $21 on Amazon), but you can find GridWorks puzzles online, which is almost as good.  If you are looking to purchase something similar to GridWorks, I highly recommend another ThinkFun product, Chocolate Fix.

Both GridWorks and Chocolate Fix have 3X3 grids in which you have to place symbols (or pieces of chocolate) in certain cells based on the visual clues you are given.  In the easy levels, the clues are very explicit.  As you work your way through the levels the game, of course, increases in difficulty.

This link just give you puzzles 1-4.  But you can click here to get over 200 puzzles.  (Scroll to the bottom to get to the beginning.)

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

Word Picture Brainteasers

Answer: “Hole in One”

I recently discovered this set of word picture brainteasers on the “Kids Pages” area of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences website.  If you make it to the bottom of the page, you will see a link for more, and the same link appears on the next page, and the next…  There is a seemingly endless amount of these puzzles available for eager students to solve.  But, if those are not enough, you also download the free app, “Rebuzzle”, on your iDevice to further challenge your kids.  Of course, some of the phrases are a bit outdated, so you may need to have the kids do a little research to find the meaning and the origin of some of the more archaic answers!

Inference Riddle Game

Inference Riddle Game is a site created by Phil Tulga that has 15 inference riddles.  The user can decide which riddle to work on by typing in a number, and can slowly add clues until he or she guesses the answer, types it in, and checks it.  This would be fun to play with the class when there is a small wait time for something.  When I play games like this with my students, I always ask them to justify their guesses.  They are also discouraged from “wild guesses” by being told they will be out of the game if they guess incorrectly.  Another way to use this site would be as a springboard for students to create their own riddles – perhaps using Powerpoint or another presentation option – that are related to something that is being studied.

 

Go on a Family Adventure!

National Geographic has an Education site that is in Beta right now.  Just in time for the summer, you can visit the site to play “Go on a Family Adventure!”  You can choose whether you would like to do a Land or Sea Adventure, which route you would like to take, and the difficulty level.  It’s a great way to practice your geography skills, see how long it typically takes to travel around the map, and to even see photographs of each of your destinations.

Summer Superheroes

Summer Superheroes is a “Parent & After School Resource” on ReadWriteThink.  It offers an interesting twist to the concept of creating your own superhero by challenging the author to invent a superhero whose powers are somehow dependent on the warmest season of the year.  The detailed instructions for motivating the child and for helping him or her to develop the story include interactive resources on the ReadWriteThink site.  This would be a fun idea to share with parents, or to use in the last month of school – when everyone’s mind is on summer anyway!

7 Hat Challenge: Master the Roles of the President

7 Hat Challenge is a game hosted by Scholastic News that allows the player to choose the difficulty level, and then try to earn 7 different presidential “hats” of responsibility.  This is a good interactive that allows the player to learn more about some of the Presidents of the United States and their many roles.  For a plethora of Presidents’ Day activities, check out the post where I found this one on “Technology Rocks.  Seriously.”

The Akinator

I found out about this site on KB Connected right before the holidays. Karen’s site recommends to “use it to introduce: Historical figures, characters from a book, famous scientists, figures in pop culture etc.” I tried it out myself, and was impressed, so I showed it to my nine-year old daughter – who became obsessed with it!  The Akinator tries to “figure out” which character you are thinking of by asking you questions.  It slowly narrows down to the correct answer based on the answers you give to its questions.  The character can be one from fiction or non-fiction.  Of course, there is less of a chance that obscure ones will be guessed correctly.  But, you may be surprised by what The Akinator knows!  My daughter was thrilled when it guessed the character from The Fablehaven series she had in mind.  In addition, if The Akinator guesses incorrectly, you have the option of inputting information about the character to help it to “learn” more.

Be aware that the site does request a name and age.  I would recommend that you have your child or student use a nickname, but give a close approximation to his or her real age.  The questions change a little for adults and might be considered inappropriate.