Above the Line in Elementary

I teach fourth grade in California which means I teach all about California history and geography. Traditionally my students have completed a research report on the four regions of California as a way to practice research, notetaking, and expository writing skills while covering the Social Studies standards. We would finish our unit by sculpting and painting salt-flour dough maps. traditional research report - not too exciting messy and disconnected from the content I wanted my students to understand about each region I realized this project needed a redesign. Enter Google Classroom and Google MyMaps! To begin the research portion of the project, I provided a note-taking guide and a HyperDoc that outlined the whole project. We used a combination of online sources and our textbook.  Rough drafts were typed in a Google Doc that was assigned in Google Classroom. We worked on writing and editing our expository paragraphs in the Google Doc and this beca...

I like to send my students home for the summer with a special gift to help them remember the school year. In the past, I gave each student a DVD with copies of all the video and photos I had collected throughout the year. This year, I wanted to do something different. A fellow teacher friend posted a word cloud project on Facebook, and I instantly knew what I wanted to do! Summer Writing Journals! I created a Google Form in which there were 33 questions. Each question was just the name of one student in the class, and a short answer response option. I instructed the students to think about one good word to describe each student in the class. We discussed examples and did some brainstorming, then I had the students access the form in our Google Classroom. Once the students completed the form, I had a list of 33 words for each student that were unique and special. I used those lists of words to create a star shaped word cloud that was unique for each student. I u...