It Was A Hit! Battleship Coordinate Planes 4th-5th

Here's a very simple game for practicing naming points on a coordinate plane.  Each student gets a grid and creates 4 points.  They guess points of a partner, whose paper they cannot see.  The partner x's bad guesses or circles correct guesses and says, "Got me!"  The first person to guess the four points of their partner wins.
So that means the teacher is freed to check on the game and see if the students actually are using (x,y) coordinate concepts in naming their points or calling the points in the game.  Game boards are collected and students had to make points and label them along the bottom anyway.  So, there's a second way to check that students have successfully done the (x,y) pattern on their own.  Besides the fact that they have partners to work with, there are two ways to determine mastery of describing points on a coordinate plane.

I'm going to try this idea with quadrilaterals and triangles as well.  It was a hit!  Pun intended.

Dance of the Parallel Lines 3rd and Up

Besides the fact that the word parallel has two l's that make parallel lines, this is a great way to demonstrate this math concept.  I play some classical music, something from Tchiakovsky.  Then, students can use two rulers, pencils, or straws to do the dance of the parallel lines from their seats.  If one choreographed it, this could be a very cute performance.

Acting as a Meme

Having some serious theater withdrawal.  Being a part of producing a school musical was terrific.  The students got so much out of it.  I am referencing it while I teach literacy, like I would mention elements plot, character, and setting of a  mentor text.

Here is a link to one of our group pictures on the school website.   Here's to getting more students involved in it next year!

Competition and Natural Selection 5th

To teach the idea of natural selection and competition for resources I set up a science experiment disguised as a game.  I had one player pretend to be a hawk.  Then, one to five people played foxes.  On the wall, I had these posters made up, along with our vocabulary words.  You can see the bunnies of different colors.  The foxes ran through a "field" to get food, or tag a bunny.  A "dot of death" means that bunny was considered eaten.  The hawk could tag the foxes trying to get food as they ran past, which mean they were eaten.  This created a visual representation of competition within an ecosystem.  The bunnies, foxes, and hawks had strategies of survival and the relationships between them were evident: most of the tan bunnies died, leaving only the white bunnies to reproduce.

To take this demonstration to a higher level, you can manipulate the number of foxes verses hawks and see what that does to the bunny population.  The more foxes we had, the more variety of bunnies were eaten.  The more hawks I had, the less foxes could get food.  The students witnessed this example of competition and had a fantastic time finding ways species are interrelated.  It was a great discussion and demonstration.

Read more on game theory in education here.