Our latest PLTW (Project Lead The Way) unit has us learning more about the sun, moon, and stars. The first part of our study has focused on the sun. We have been researching with books, videos, and even an experiment. For our experiment, the students made a sun tracker out of an index card and paper. We used a compass on our iPads to point our sun trackers North. Then every two hours, we went outside to mark the shadow on the sun tracker.
The students not only recorded a mark for the shadow, they also took photos each time. They saved their photos to their digital portfolios in the app SeeSaw. The students noticed that the shadow moved as the day progressed, the sun appeared to move across the sky. Since we were also research reading, the students realized that they were seeing evidence of the Earth's rotation. The children also made the connection that reading the shadows on the sun tracker was similar to reading a clock. These scientists amaze me!
The students compiled their conclusions in the Launch Logs. They also wrote some of their most interesting facts and we published their facts with some crayon resists sun art. On their fact writing, students used symbols to denote their thinking. A plus sign (+) means the fact is something they already knew, a minus sign (-) shows a fact that they learned, and an exclaimation point (!) is a fact that made the students say WOW! Check out our sun research in the hallway.
After our big win, we know this class's reading is EPIC. It was the perfect time to introduce the students to the app EPIC. EPIC is a reading subscription service that is free to educators. If you are interested in getting it at home, it costs $4.99 a month. There are over 10,000 different books on the app. The students create profiles and tailor the book selection to their genre interests. One of the students said it was like Netflix with books. He was exactly right. The students also earn achievements/badges for the reading they do in the app. The app has a great selection of ebooks and audio books for early readers. Check out this great app with a free month trial. One of the first times we were exploring the app, the students took a screen shot of what they were reading and uploaded it to a Padlet. Here is a snap shot of our reading one day. Look at the variety!
