STEM

Blasting Back to School Blog Hop and Giveaway from thelessondeli

Are you ready for Back to School? I’m joining several other upper grade teachers to help you get ready for the next school year, and to give away some AWESOME prizes! You’ll have the opportunity to win something different on each blog in our group, so make sure that you visit the next blog in the blog hop at the bottom of this page. To enter to win the HUGE gift certificate to Teachers Pay Teachers, visit our group blog, Lesson Delicatessen. Make sure you hop through all the blogs to read all the great back to school tips and be entered to win over 20 different prizes!

UPDATE–Congratulations Cora B.! You’ve won The Pensive Sloth’s Rafflecopter giveaway. You should have received an email with instructions on claiming your prize. Thanks to all who entered and hopped along. Have a great beginning of the year!

School is just around the corner and in no time at all there will be 25 nervous, smiling, excited little people sitting in front of you. Put some STEM into your first week back by having your upper elementary students engage in LITERAL team building. Here’s how it works.

Put students in groups of 2-4 and give each group a stack of index cards. You can start with 30 per group, but have many more available just in case! Their goal is to work together to build a structure that is 10 inches tall using ONLY the index cards. No tape or glue! The catch is, on each card students must write something that their group has in common. You can add additional rules based on your class. I love watching how as students want more cards to build with, they work hard to find creative things they have in common (even if it is that they all breathe oxygen).

Back to School STEM Fun–Literal Team Building!

Before you start, I suggest making a chart of how to find things students have in common. It seems like a simple idea, but sometimes our kiddos need encouragement. Ideas include things you like, things you hate, places you’ve been, things you have done, family, pets, travel, games, sports, music, movies, etc. The list could go on forever…

Thanks for stopping by.

–The Pensive Sloth

Enter The Pensive Sloth’s Rafflecopter giveaway by clicking the Rafflecopter link below. I’m giving away $10 winner’s choice from my TPT store and a $20 gift card to Oriental Trading. There are 4 ways to win. Good luck!

************CLICK this link for my Rafflecopter giveaway.**********

Then…hop on over to Rockin’ Resources for more back to school ideas and a chance to win some writing resources!

And don’t forget to visit The Lesson Delicatessen for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate to Teachers Pay Teachers!

THE PENSIVE SLOTH’S GIVEAWAY TERMS AND CONDITIONS–This giveaway runs August 4-10, 2014 and includes up to $10 of products from The Pensive Sloth’s TPT page and a $20 e-gift certificate from Oriental Trading. Once a winner is chosen at random through Rafflecopter, the winner will have 24 hours to claim his/her prize. If the winner does not claim the prize within 24 hours, I will spin again and contact the next person. Please feel free to contact me at pensivesloth@gmail.com if you have questions. Good luck!

There is a hilarious site called Shut Up and Take My Money that peddles unusual gadgets and such. Not all of which are suitable for work, so if you are reading this at school I suggest clicking on that link when you get home. Well, here’s the first in a series of a teacher-style version of classroom must-haves!

Somehow I happened upon this YouTube video for a product called Circuit Scribe.

Then promptly checked out their Kickstarter page. They raised almost $700,000 dollars!!! But… the product won’t ship until August. Boohoo! You can pre-order here. Basically, it allows you to draw circuits that work. Imagine the many ways you could use this in your science classroom. Talk about STEM!

You should know that I’m not patient, so I found something similar on Amazon that I can play with until I get my Circuit Scribe! I ordered this $10 pen that contains nickel instead of silver and I can not wait to give it a try. I should probably go buy some watch batteries and LED lights. I’ll come back and share the fun when it arrives.

–The Pensive Sloth

***NOTE–I was NOT paid and am not affiliated with any of the above groups. I’m just a teacher-consumer interested in new tools to make learning fun for my students!***

UPDATE: While this is a really cool product, I don’t see it being affordable enough for regular classroom use. After playing with it myself for an evening (I was very impressed), I realized that this could get costly with a group of 5th graders and opted to go with a different circuit activity at school. It required some major problem-solving on my part, with trial and error as I figured out how to fold the paper just right so the positive and negative sides of the batteries connected to my hand-drawn ‘wires.’ I could see middle and high-school students really thriving with this, but my little elementary guys would need to use a lot of ink for their trial/error sessions, and it’s a little pricey for my tastes because you’d have to replace the pens every year. Perhaps if you wrote a grant?