teaching process skills with junk! and a freebie

for the past week and a half my kiddos have been playing with bowls of junk from the world of my closet! old hair bows, pieces of sponge, shells, pipe cleaner, snap cubes, clothespins, you know all the junk we collect though the years!

I have seriously had these ol’ bowls for the past 9 years-with the same stuff in them! {minus the gum cause it loses a little something after awhile}. Initially my teammie and I taught process skills to our 4th graders with this stuff. Later I used them for teaching about characteristics of matter to my 2nd graders.

Well, I broke them out again and we learned all about the process skills in science. I honestly forget I have them until they topple over on my head.

We’ve had a blast and it was all free! We will begin our first unit, my fav MATTER!, this week. My grade level decided we should teach the process skills prior to our first unit to get the kids in the right frame of mind. So, I took what we used with our 4th graders, edited it for wee ones, cutesyified it, and believe it or not-changed some of the skills because someone decided science has changed in the past decade!

 

for whatever reason, the wording on this thing was a beast! I had Mr. Lamb listening to me read sentences several times to help with sentence structure. See-real world applications! Here’s some of the unit in action plus there is a freebie at the end of the post!

some observation-students choose one item to observe and share about {communication}

here’s some classifying! Shoo!

And here’s the freebie! Classifying with shoes. It’s nothing new, but it is always a hit! click to download. I may add a little assessment later on, so I’ll let you know!

and in other news, if you’ve emailed me in the past, ol week or so, sorry I haven’t responded! about a month ago we decided to build a new home, put ours up for sale and stay at my mom’s empty house. Well, we moved out {somewhat} and are now at her house. It took maybe a day for Mr. Lamb to decide he missed living less than a minute from work and 10 minutes to get anywhere else! So it looks like we will be renovating and heading back home in a few months.

in the meantime, outside of the city limits we have some new neighbors! right in the backyard!