5th Grade Explains it All - Vertebrates Project

We kicked off the new year with a few new apps in 5th grade. (Catch up on my other iPad posts here) I've been anxious to use the app Explain Everything with my students since downloading it myself back in August. One of the (many) things that intrigued me about Explain Everything was the functionality - I could use it as a teaching tool and my students can create projects as well. 

As our first Explain Everything production, I decided to introduce the tool during my science classes (I have three sessions this year!). Mastering the five classes of vertebrates is a big deal in 5th grade and I thought it would be great - and equally fun - to introduce Explain Everything with this unit. 

My requirements for the project were the following:

Name the 5 classes of vertebrates

Provide three living examples of each vertebrate

Identify three characteristics of each vertebrate

From there.. the sky was the limit!

I strongly believe what made this project so successful (and fun.. have I mentioned how much my kids loved it?) was the intense app tutorial I provided on day one. I justified spending more time on introducing the app to eliminate confusion and frustration for the rest of the year. I simply introduced all of the features and walked through different samples with the kids. This way, they would spend more time focusing on the content of their project and not playing with the lightsaber feature. (Can you tell we had to spend time playing with the lightsaber?)

Once the kids started working on their project... they were ALL IN. Within 10 minutes, my students were showing ME the features I hadn't figured out yet. Pretty incredible! 

Our vertebrates project using @explaineverything are coming together!! #edtechchat pic.twitter.com/EHGFm9NhY4

— Jordon (@furnelly) January 16, 2015

I anticipate our next encounter with Explain Everything will not be as elaborate. I want students to see the app as tool to demonstrate their understanding of multiple content areas. I'm excited to see what else we create this year!

Curious to see some of our projects? Check out our playlist on YouTube! (P.S. Creating a playlist was a great and easy way to share our projects with families!) 

Name That Organism!

Lions! Tigers! Bears! Oh my. 

Let me try that again... Vertebrates! Invertebrates! Dichotomous keys! Oh my. 

Classifying organisms is all the rage in my classroom right now. After much discussion on vertebrates and invertebrates we took a day to dive into Dichotomous Keys. My google search bar has been running a marathon lately with the amount of searches I've done on this unit. While searching one day, I found this link to a "Donut Sort" for dichotomous keys.  Anything that involves food perks my interest pretty quick! 

Basically, groups of students are given six "unknown" donuts and must create their own key to identify each donut. I thought this sounded like a great idea! Then, I went to the grocery store and realized that I  don't even know six different types of donuts. After a few minutes of thinking wayyyyy too hard about donuts, I decided on "snacks". I gathered a few common snacks: wheat thins, cheez-its, goldfish, etc. 

After a few trial runs with dichotomous keys, I gave each group six ziplock baggies with unidentified organisms. In small groups, they had to classify their snacks based on their properties. 

No, those are not Cheez-Its!

Their goal was to create a key and identify each "organism" in the baggies. I gave little direction and let each group go for it! It was interesting to see how different groups tackled the project. Not only were the students collaborating and communicating with one another but they were talking about science!

After groups finished, I let each group present their individual keys on the SmartBoard. The end results were pretty spectacular across the board. All three classes approached it differently and each one was successful. Win win! 

Handy Dandy Textbooks and Science Notebooks

Now, before I hit the sack (yes, at 9:00 PM) a little motivation for your Wednesday.

You Said It, Mr. Mandela.