YouTube Videos

Here are a couple of YouTube videos I found pertaining to my unit of Pebbles, Sand, and Silt.  

Rocks and Soil Song

This video is a song that is catchy.  It demonstrates how rocks and can be made into sand and clay.  It also gives examples of real world objects made of rock materials.  This video could be easily shown at the beginning of my unit of study to introduce students to some vocabulary terms.


Life Cycle of a Rock

This video goes through the life cycle of a rock.  It starts with a picture of a boulder and ends with a picture of silt.  I like this video because I will be teaching my students about these different earth materials and it blows up the picture to make it big enough so everyone can see.  This video would be useful at the beginning of my unit to introduce vocabulary or at the end of the unit as a review.

New Year - New Blogs

While I was searching for blogs that had some sort of significance to my learning, I came upon two that I really enjoyed.

Creating Questions

This is a science blog that was created as a resource for students, parents, and other teachers.  It was created by a science teacher who serves students in 1st-3rd grade.  I really like this blog because it has links to a variety of science units.  Within each of these links, he posts information such as, "major understandings, games related to the topic, and short video-clips.  

I decided to follow this blog because I chose "pebbles, sand, and silt" as my unit for our Backward Design assignment.  I liked how this blog has games and video-clips that I can quickly integrate into my unit to assist my students in their learning.  Although the units that he teaches at each grade level don't match with what we teach, it just takes a quick click at the top and some exploring to find the unit that matches.  I will definitely use this blog in the future.

Edutopia

According to Edutopia, this blog provides teachers with practical classroom strategies and tips, lesson plan ideas, and innovative ways on how to improve your teaching.  Looking around this blog, I found many quick, reliable articles pertaining to the classroom environment. 

I chose to follow this blog because it has quality materials that pertain to teaching.  I did a quick search on "classroom environment" and found a variety of articles pertaining to this topic.  A few of the articles were titled, "Building Relationships," "Building a Positive, Trusting Classroom Environment," and "A Place for Learning."  This website will come in handy when searching for useful information regarding our collaborative Action Research assignment.