Free Virtual Class Field Trips....for When You Can't Actually Visit in Person

 

I'm writing this blog post in Spring 2021, when my home province of Ontario is in lockdown, and schools are once again virtual.  Like many school districts across the world, planning a real field trip involving school buses and permission slips is not possible this year, so teachers are looking for alternatives.  

A virtual field trip is one that is done via technology; it allows anyone to visit a location that may be all the way across the world, from the comfort of their chair.  While many virtual field trips have a cost, there are tons of free possibilities out there!

Upper elementary or middle school teachers can check out these free tours to see if one or more of them can fit in with their curriculums or simply make an engaging way of spending time in those last few days of school.

Canada's Parliament Buildings

When I was in elementary school, another nearby school sent its Grade 8 classes to Ottawa for a week to visit Canada's capital while MY principal declared he wasn't a travel agent.  While those other classes were visiting the Parliament Buildings, I was visiting the class of Sister Marie Theresa's friend's class in Tilbury, another small town.  We visited local industries, ate lunch at the Blue Bonnet Cafe, and attended mass.  Two weeks later, their class came to Wallaceburg to visit our town.   I may still be holding a (massive) grudge about the whole episode.

So, I never did get to see those Parliament Buildings, but you and your class can, courtesy of the internet.  Make your way through:

a) the Peace Tower Observation Deck.

b) the Memorial Centre.

c) the House of Commons.

d) the Prime Minister's Office.

e) the Library of Parliament.

f)  a meeting room.

Iqaluit:  Explore the Canadian Arctic

This site is in development, but it allows your students to discover a bit about what it would be like to live in an arctic community, which can only be accessed by plane or boat!

The Emerald Edge Rainforest 

Visit the largest intact coastal temperate rainforest in the world, which your students may be surprised to learn stretches across Canada's west coast into Alaska in the north and back to the United States (Washington).  The rainforest is home to more than 50 Indigenous communities and a vast array of wildlife.

Soarin' - Walt Disney World

If you have a few minutes to kill, take your class to my very favourite ride at my favourite place in the world!  They will fly over the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and the Eiffel Tower, to name a few.   While we can't visit Disney right now, we CAN go virtually soaring!

Eiffel Tower

My friend Michelle McDonald has put together a free virtual trip to the Eiffel Tower in France!  It includes informational text, questions, and a grading rubric to go along with a video.  This has been created in Google Slides, and requires no paper!

San Diego Zoo Animal Cams 

The San Diego Zoo has webcams set up 24/7 on thirteen different animals, including elephants, koalas and penguins.  Your students might enjoy popping in on some of these animals to see what life is like for them.  You might want to tie this in with the great book Should There Be Zoos? by Tony Stead, found in almost every school library!

Quebec

This is another virtual tour created in Google Slides (created by me!).  Students learn about the Quebec Winter Carnival, visit the Indigenous community of Inukjuak, and become acquainted with some unique facts about this province.
  

If you would your students to explore all thirteen provinces and territories of Canada, check the full resource by clicking here or on the image below.

4 Great Ways to End the School Year!

How do you like to end the school year in your upper elementary or middle school class?  I aim for activities that engage my students' imaginations and interests, while also reviewing academic content from the year we've spent together. 

Here are a few ideas for you to consider as that last day of school finally approaches!

Board Games

Two or three weeks before school ends, I begin a board game unit.  It takes about 11 days in all, with the end products being student-created games that review different academic subject areas.  This is one of the most successful activities I do, and students look forward to it all year!  

We start by playing and examining different board games we have in our classroom or from home, looking at:

• how instructions are formatted
• types of different game boards
• types of playing pieces (ie. dice, cards, etc.)

Students then get into groups, with each group choosing a different academic subject. Then day by day, with structured support, they create a board game that can be played by their peers and by next year's students.  

My students have so much fun with this unit that I'm not sure they realize that they are actually reviewing the full school year.  If you would like to check out the board game I created for my TPT store, click here!

Debates

Another great activity that grabs students' attention are class debates.  To help them meet with success, I:

• show online videos of student debates.
• carefully teach the formal structure of a debate.
• put students in teams of 3, with each team debating against one other team.
• demonstrate how to research and prepare for a debate.
• involve students not directly in a particular debate to become "shareholders" in the debate topic, allowing them to assess each debate team using specific criteria

If you would like a free debate schedule/organizer, click here!  I also have a full class debate unit available in my TPT store.

Book Swaps

At the end of every school year my classroom library always requires some "weeding" and reorganizing. Long ago I realized that  I could involve my students in this task, and from that initial thought I developed my annual "book swap" event.

My process for this book swap is:

1. Review characteristics of each literary genre (ie. adventure, historical fiction, etc.) and each type of non-fiction texts. As our class library was set up by students back in September by genre, they are brought back full-circle!  
2. I assign pairs or groups of students to each genre, and have them go through that genre's book bins to ensure that each book belongs there.  Students also look for books that we have more than two copies of, or that are no longer in prime shape, and set those aside for our book swap.
3. All extra copies and outdated books are put in a box.
4. I send a letter home to parents explaining that we will be having a book swap day coming up. I invite students to bring in a book or two that they no longer need or want with their parents' permission.  For each book they bring in, I give them a "book swap ticket".
5. 
   The day before our book swap day, students sort ALL the available books (books students previously weeded from our class collection + books they brought in), and create labels for each genre.
6. Book Swap Day:  students exchange their "book swap tickets" for new-to-them books.  Students who were unable to bring in books from home also have an opportunity to select books from the extras from the classroom.  

Now all students have some new reading material for the summer!

Get your FREE Book Swap Planner here!

Clear Out the Classroom Day!

In addition to extra books, which I deal with through our annual book swap, I usually find myself with tons of items that can easily be given to students.  (NOTE:  I make sure I have checked with my principal before doing this activity.)  Those items can include:

• extra freebies included in Scholastic Book orders throughout the year.
  
• posters I will no longer need.
• extra craft supplies that will not be needed in the future
• books left over from the Book Swap or from Scholastic orders
• leftover "rewards" from our classroom reward program.

I tie this "clearout" in with our class reward program,  which you can read about in this blog post.  I fill our token bucket with ALL of the students' tokens, and gather it together with all the items I plan to giveaway.  We settle into a nice shady spot on the playground,  and I randomly reach in and grab a token.  That student gets to choose one item to keep, and then s/he reaches into the token bucket to choose the next token/student.  We keep going until all the items have been given away. 

What is YOUR favourite end of year activity?  I'd love to hear about it!

Margie

The Ultimate Classroom Debate Guide

Engaging students in their learning can be a challenge in any classroom, but there is one tried-and-true strategy to rev up their interest:  a classroom debate!  I was first introduced to this activity back when I was in Grade 11, as Mr. Deery, our English teacher, scheduled a class debate every Friday.  No one ever wanted to be absent on a Friday, because those classes were the best of the week!  When I became an elementary school teacher I knew that with careful planning, younger students could successfully participate in debates.

How do debates address curriculum expectations or academic standards?

I live in Ontario, Canada, where our provincial Ministry of Education provides a curriculum guide for each subject.  Teachers plan activities that address the expectations in these documents.  At a quick glance, debates can be planned that meet expectations in the following subject areas for Grade 6:

• Language Arts: 
• Oral Communication:  1.2 - Demonstrate active listening strategies
• Reading:  1.4 - Demonstrate understanding (by summarizing & explaining important ideas and citing relevant supporting details)
• Writing:  1.3  Research (gather information to support ideas)

• Social Studies:
• Strand B:  Canada's Interactions with the Global Community
• B1.2:  analyse responses of Canadian governments and NGOs to an economic, environmental, political and/or social issue of international significance.
• Science:
• Understanding Life Systems - Biodiversity
• Analyse a local issue related to biodiversity, taking different points of view into consideration.

If you teach in other areas of the country or world, you most likely have very similar standards which can be met through the use of class debates.

What are the rules of a debate?

Debates offer a specific structure that make lesson planning quite easy.  (Click here or on the image to the right to download a FREE debate schedule!)

• Students are placed in teams of 3.
• Two teams are involved in each debate:  three students each on the affirmative and negative teams.
• A debate topic is assigned or chosen for each debate.   For a unit on government, for example, the debate topic statement could be presented as "All citizens should be required to vote."  The affirmative team supports this statement, and the negative team would dispute it.
• Each team member is given a specific responsibility:
• Student 1:  Give initial statement AND summary statement.
• Student 2:  Give a rebuttal to the other teams initial statement.
• Student 3:  Gives a rebuttal to the other team's rebuttal. 
• I have all students not actively participating in a specific debate complete an evaluation form after each part of the debate.  At the end, each students vote for the team they felt presented the best argument.

What are some debate ideas?

Because I love to teach with a cross-curricular approach, I look to science, social studies and health for debate topics.  Here are some ideas to consider:

• The voting age should be lowered.
• All restaurants should eliminate the use of plastic straws and cutlery.
• Children under 14 years old should not be allowed on any social media site.
• Companies should be allowed to use animals to test their products on.
• Virtual learning is as effective as in-class learning.

There are many websites that have hundreds of great debate topics for you to consider!

What else should I consider when planning a debate unit?

• Allow students to watch some online debates by students their own age!
• Invite a high school debate team to your classroom to conduct a mini-debate and answer your students' questions.
• Allow the "audience" to become "stakeholders".  Stakeholders are individuals who have a specific reason for being interested in the topic.  If one of your topics involves the use of plastics in restaurants, for example, some of your students could watch the debate from the perspectives of restaurant owners or staff.

Where can I learn more?

I'm glad you asked!  Check out my 4-day complete debate unit for Grades 4-7, which has complete lesson plans, organizers, and assessment tools to help make your class debate a highlight of the school year!

Bell Work to Start Each Day!

August is quickly approaching, and with it the slow realization that I actually need to start thinking about September! I'll be teaching a Grade 5/6 split for the first time in my career, and it dawned on me that I had no suitable bell work for this particular grade.   It was time to get to work!

September Grade 5/6 Bell Work

For many years I've had my students do "bell work", in the form of answering one prompt each morning while I take care of attendance, reading notes from parents, etc.  Most of the tasks are directly curriculum-related, while others are on the creative side.  I mix things up daily:  one day they might be working on a probability task, the next day on analogies, and the third day responding to a persuasive writing prompt.  I've found that this approach prevents boredom, both for me and my students!  It was time to gather my resources and get some bell work ready for my new students. 

I had already created bell work for Grades 2, 3/4, 5, and 6, so I decided to take out the Grade 5 and 6 bell work and see which prompts I felt would work well for both grades, both in terms of curriculum expectations AND interest level.  I always make September's work fairly easy, so that everyone is able to handle the tasks independently, and then increase the challenges as the year goes by.  I took the same approach as I put together a year's work of Grade 5/6 bell work.

Each month's bell work fits on one double-sided sheet of paper; I usually print on coloured paper just to make it stand out more inside a student's desk, should it come loose from his/her notebook.  I copy ALL 10 months the month before school starts, and file them by month.  I keep the original sheets in page protectors within the file folders as well.

When students enter the classroom on the very first morning of the school year, I have them find their desk and put their backpacks, lunches, etc under it.  I have already put a lined bell work notebook on their desks, along with the September bell work sheet, two sharpened pencils and an eraser.  I ask them to write the date at the top of the first blank page of their notebooks, and put a "1" to the left of the margin at the left hand side of the page.  (Sometimes I'm even organized enough to have this displayed on the Smartboard as well!)  I then have them read the first prompt and answer in their notebooks.  I want them to know from the very first minute of the year that work will be the priority in our class.  Only once I've taken up the work will I start dealing with the nuts and bolts of how we will run our classroom!  From then on students know that this is how every day will start, and I don't need to remind them what to do (well, maybe sometimes:)!  

If you'd like to try this bell work in your own classroom, click the image to the left and download this freebie from my store!  I'd love to hear how it works for you.

This bell work is also available as a PDF/Google Slides bundle.  This makes it easy to have students with IEP accommodations working on the same tasks as the rest of the class.  It is also perfect for distance learning!

Check out all my Canadian Grade 2 - Grade 5/6 Bell Work resources by clicking here!

American versions of the same resources are also available.  Click here to peek at them!