So, be prepared for a few teaching posts in the near future. Now that I’m off work for a bit I have the time to get some blogging done on a regular basis! I have a few posts coming up on interactive notebooks for math and using word clouds in the classroom.
Today I’ll be talking about using dodecahedrons! Dodeca-what, you say? A dodecahedron is a twelve-sided, three-dimensional figure. Last year a teacher friend of mine gave me the idea of using them for reading, but they are very versatile and a great alternative to research projects, book reports, science units…the sky is the limit, really. They are also easy to differentiate for students. I normally like doing them at the end of the year when the kids are in ‘summer’ mode and need a change of pace.
Each child gets twelve pieces of card stock with the circular pattern on the front. Outlined within the circle is a pentagon, which you can draw yourself to make a template to copy, or if you are really gutsy, have the children draw it. Students do something different on each piece related to the main topic. This time I had students complete their pieces over the story Penguin Chick in our Reading Street book. It is a nonfiction book about the life of an emperor penguin from egg to adulthood. Here is what my students did for each side:
1 – Title piece (title, author, picture)
2, 3, 4 – Vocabulary web on each over vocabulary from the text
5 – Research on Antarctica
6 – Web including three facts about a penguin chick
7 – Web including three facts about a mother penguin
8 – Web including three facts about a father penguin
9 – A paragraph about what biome Antarctica is.
10 – Attributes a penguin has to help it survive in its habitat
11 – How the Arctic compares with the Antarctic
12 – An explanation of what the genre of expository nonfiction is
This project can be done over a wide arrange of subject areas and grade levels. The only downside is that it uses a ton of card stock…240 sheets for a class of 20. I don’t recommend using regular white paper, as it is not sturdy enough, imo. I’ll continue to do this each year with my class. The kids were very proud of their finished products!
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