Inspired by my visit to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum back in December, I decided to assign my students an assignments using the identification cards given out at the museum. For those not familiar, when you enter the museum you are given an ID card with the identity of a Jewish person that experienced the…

I know what your thinking…..the highlight of my day, looking at Mr. McClung’s funky mouth germs…..YES! Below is a picture of the agar from my water bottle sample, which by far has been the grossest result we have had to this point. Below is a fairly new discovery from last hour science class today. One…

Today we took some time out of our normal class schedule to observe Earth Day. First part of the day students prepared Earth Day slideshows using Google Docs. Below is one of the many slideshows that was prepared by my students. In addition to today’s events, Mr. C’s students brought us 6 frogs, and we…

Today we continued with our bacteria discussion in science class. After all that swabbing yesterday, we decided to take a look at our results. As stated in the previous post, we swabbed everything from toilets to cell phones. Above is a picture of a petri dish from a swabbing of one of our beloved cockroaches….

Don’t call it a come back…. ….with school starting to wind down, many students have lost their passion for this weekly celebration that we like to call Tie Tuesday ®; but, don’t tell that to Mr. C’s fifth grade class. With the a little help from Mr. C, his entire class is decked out in…

Today in science class we started our discussion about microorganisms by thinking a little bit about bacteria and fungus. I posed a question to my class, “what in our school has the largest amount of bacteria present?” As one would expect, this got pretty gross in a hurry. First let’s discuss our setup. Above is…

For the past couple of days my students have been preparing slideshow presentations about Australian Rules Football. This was inspired by our conversation with Mr. Lamshed the other day. After talking to Mr. Lamshed many of my students were confused by what Australian Football was, so I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to…

After yesterday excitement cockroach lab, we the opportunity today to reflect on yesterday’s discoveries. Today in class we reviewed some key points from yesterday’s lab including, walking, eating, antennas, and stimuli. Below is a video of our discussion from today. After our discussion was over, we took sometime to practice our Cornell Note-Taking. We used…

The day my students have been waiting for since the first day of school…..cockroach lab. Today we continued our discussion about insects by taking a further look at Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches. Students took a closer look at these little critters by analyzing characteristics of the roaches. Students were asked to pay particular attention to eating…

After Mr. Lamshed was able to upload our full conversation, I thought i would be appropriate to update my post and re-post it with all the extra ‘goodies’. Today marks a very special day in our classroom. We had our first Skype conversation with Mr. Lamshed of Australia. Mr. Lamshed was kind enough to join…