Shannon+Dardis

Shannon Dardis 3rd Grade Teacher Rawson Elementary

When teaching the Six Traits of Writing and incorporating this into my writer's workshop, I am always looking for new ways to help children brainstorm and generate ideas for writing. I use various mini lessons that help students to come up with topics and ideas. One of the strategies I have used is to put a picture up on the board and give students time to write about the picture. I have used classic pieces of art work, illustrations from books, cartoon drawings or picures that may depict a situation or the emotions someone is going through. It's always interesting to see what direction students will go when responding to the picture. Some will just describe the picture, others will tell a fictional story and sometimes they might try to interpret the artwork/picture.
 * __Lesson #1-Six Traits Writing-Ideas__**

I decided to use the tab for pictures and backgrounds in the Interactive Gallery on the SMART Board to generate ideas. After using it for the first time, I noticed that students were able to come up with more detail and focus to their writing entries. I then explored some more pictures with the whole class and they voted which picture they wanted to use for their writing block. I noticed that this was very motivating because students were asking when we would be writing next!

__**Lesson #2-Investigations, Grade 3, Unit 5, Investigation 2, 2.1-2.3**__ In Unit 5, //Equal Groups//, we are learning about multiplication and division concepts. In the 2nd Investigation we explore multiples of 2's, 3,'s, 4's, 5's, 6's, and 10's on 100's charts. We use an overhead to hilight the multiples of these numbers. We also overlap the 100's chart on the overhead to display patterns between numbers and how they are related.

By using the SMART Board students are able to hilight and manipulate these charts with ease. In the Gallery under the area of Mathematics, there are different Interactive Hundreds charts you can use. We used these charts to find the factors of the numbers listed above. The kids loved using the charts so much that they began to race each other and see how fast they could hilight all the numbers. We called it "//Factor Race//". They were also able to identify incorrect factors by recognizing certain patterns over time. It also cut down on the time that I had to wrestle with making transparencies for the different charts and using the overhead.

One of our Einstein Units in third grade is Rocks and Minerals. Students have an opportunity to explore many different rocks and mineral samples and the characteristics of each. Once they have studied similarities and differences of rocks, they get to make a //Rock Field Guide//. They don't know the names of the 12 different rock samples when they make the field guide. Insteasd they use adjectives to describe the characteristics of each of these rocks and what makes them similar or different from the next. Once they have completed their //Rock Field Guide//, we discuss the different categories of rocks and how they are formed. After this is all done and the students have a strong understanding of the Groups and Characteristics of these rocks, they then get to learn the different names of their rocks.
 * __Lesson #3-Science, Rocks and Minerals-Einstein__**

After learning the names of their rocks, I decided to explore the website [|www.rocksforkids.com] with the SMART Board. By linking the SMART Board to this website, students were able to go on and see wonderful full sized rocks they wrote about in their Field Guides and explore many more. By interacting with this webiste via the SMART Board, it enhanced their appreciation of the rocks they wrote and described about in their Field Guides.

In third grade, we explore simple machines and learn about the characteristics that make each one different. Students learn about pulleys, levers, inclined planes, wedges, wheel and axles and screws. We use a website called [|www.edheads.com] This is an outstanding website for testing student's knowledge of the different types of simple machines.
 * __Lesson #4-Science, Simple Machines__**

By linking the SMART Board to this website, students are able explore different rooms in a house and identify all the different simple machines they can find in each room. When using the SMART Board to explore this website, students are working together and testing eachother's knowledge of the simple machines. They use team work and it becomes an open dialogue of teaching and learning between peers. When using this website individually in the lab, students are still learning, but it is so much more powerful when done as a whole group on the SMART Board.