First I have to say that I love AmazingClassroom.com and have been super excited that Kelly has also started a blog to go along with it. I use her resources all the time – in fact I’m busy cutting out some of her new stuff to use for centers this year! Thanks Kelly!
I’m very honored and excited to be asked to write a post for the blog – hopefully it will be well-received so I’ll be asked to write more! So before my post, a little about me…. I have been teaching for 10 years and have taught 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades (with some K summer school teaching thrown in as well). After teaching 4th grade for 5 years, I’m moving back up to 5thgrade – it should be interesting! I have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and just finished my master’s degree in educational technology last December.
I love using technology in the classroom, so am very lucky to have a Promethean board as well as ActivExpressions and an ActiView document camera. Both my students and I love using these tools to help make learning fun. I’m also a Promethean-certified trainer for my school district and have presented at numerous local, state and even national conferences. In fact, I attended/presented at ISTE this summer with Kelly and have come back with many new ideas that I’m excited to try this year in my classroom! Yea for technology!
And now enough about me and on to the post!
As I’m writing this, it is July 27th– yikes! Hard to believe it will be August in a few days which means the start of school is just around the corner. That being said, I’ve been starting to think about the upcoming year as I’m sure all the other teachers out there are doing. As I’m sure most of you have figured out long ago, the best type of learning is that in which students don’t even realize they are learning. Games are a great way to accomplish that. I LOVE using the Lakeshore Learning Games that Kelly has written about in earlier blog posts; however they don’t have a huge selection of games for science which is what I have taught for the last 5 years. (My school/grade level has decided to departmentalize so that I teach science for several classes as well as reading for my homeroom class.) Therefore, I’ve gone looking online and found some sites with fun science games that can be used in a variety of ways – whole class as topic intro or review, small group during center time or individually when students finish work. I’m going to share two of my favorite of these sites.
This is the index page for the Sheppard Software site. As you will see when you navigate there, it contains games for a wide variety of subjects, not just science. However, I have used primarily the ones in the Kid’s Corner section. My favorites in the section are the ones relating to food chains. There are some where students have to decide what part of the food chain a particular organism would fit in, others where students have to decide what type of consumer an organism is, as well as ones in which students have to put the organisms into the correct order to make an accurate food chain. They are perfect for whole class lessons or individual review/practice. During my food chains unit I always have students asking to play these games, so I make sure to put them on my AmazingClassroom.com science page so students/parents can access them at home.
This website, Science Kids, has a section specifically for games. The games are divided into living things, physical processes, solids/liquids/gases, math games, and detective science. Each section has several games related to various topics of study. All of the games could be done individually because the game includes directions to help guide students. The detective science section is very cool because it acts as more of a video game in which the students have a science challenge that they need to solve. It is a great resource that I often link to on my AmazingClassroom.com website for parents to see what we are doing in class and in case students want to play at home.
I hope that you will be able to use these two science resources! I would love to hear your thoughts on them or others that you use in your classroom (leave a comment below). I’m always looking for new things to add to my “teacher toolbox”! Good luck with the beginning of your school year!
