Five for Friday! Games, Science Labs and More!

Happy Saturday (this is become my new trend!)!!  Maybe someday I will link up again with Doodle Bugs on a Friday. :)  I hope that you all had a great week!  I am still in LOVE with teaching middle school!  We have been having SOOOOOOO much fun!  I can't wait to share my Five for Friday with you!

 The first thing that we did this week to reinforce our understanding of finding the difference between positive and negative integers was to play a little game that I made for them.  They HONESTLY had a BLAST with it!  It also gave the students a lot of practice with adding and subtracting on to either positive or negative integers.  They almost forgot they were doing math! :)

 The class honestly kept asking to play this game every day ALL week long...no joke!!!  They thought it was HILARIOUS when their money total was in the negative (I guess I have more to teach them ;) ).  You can grab the game HERE!

If you are currently doing positive and negative integers in your classroom, you might also like:

 The second thing that we did this week that was a TON of fun was our flower dissection lab in science!!  I did it twice with two different classes, and when we did it, I used two different flowers for each class.  One class a student even brought a flower from home.

Before this lesson we had learned about the different parts of the flower, the students drew their own flower and labeled the parts to put in their science interactive notebooks.  We also completed Case 4 of the Great Plant Escape with their Chromebooks.  The students used their notebooks during the lab to help them identify the parts and sort them onto their sheets.

We used roses AND lilies for the lab, and had a local flower shop donate them! :)  Personally I liked the lilies better because they could see the parts a lot better...however, I learned an important lesson about lilies from flower shops...and taught my kids when I learned, too.  When the flower shops first get the lilies they take the anthers off to keep them blooming longer.  The sepals are also off, so we had to do some improvisation when we sorted the parts. :)

Either way, the students had a GREAT time, and they are all ready now to take the parts of a flower quiz on Monday!!!

If you're interested in this lab you can find it HERE.

 I teach two sections of math, and one section of science each day.  It works out well, because for my first class I make an anchor chart for their interactive notebooks (which they create in their own notebook), and then for my second math class we create the anchor chart in my example interactive notebook.

We had fun this week with the checkbook activity deciding what to buy and spend money on.  We also had fun making up our own absolute value word problems (bottom left).  After we designed our anchor chart, we broke off into pairs, and the students wrote and presented their own story problems.  I told them NOT to worry about the realistic part of the question (if you want to jump out of a plane and land in the water 45 feet below sea level--that was fine!) because I was more concerned that they knew it was more about each situations distance from zero than anything.  They turned out really cute!!  I should have taken some pictures of their finished products.  They are already teasing me about how I take pictures of EVERYTHING. :)

 My teammate this year and I work so well together!!!  We are on the same page with a lot of our beliefs in education, and we both work hard to make sure that our students feel cared for and know that we believe in them.  I couldn't have been paired better this year, and I am very blessed.  

We do this behavior baseball program on our team, and when students have less than three strike outs for the week, we reward them during our enrichment time on Fridays.  This Friday we played a Minute to Win it game. :) I meant to take pictures, but we were so caught up in FUN, I didn't. :(

Just a reminder if you don't already follow me on Instagram, please do:  @immixingitupinmiddle.  I post often on their during the week with what we are doing in our classroom, then on Fridays or sometimes in between I will write up a summary of our week.  I always follow back.  I do have my account set to private (just because I teach middle school! :)) Don't forget to check out the You Oughta Know Blog Hop this week, too!!!  Lots of GREAT ideas!  I wrote about how to SAVE ON MAKING COPIES!!!!! :)