Of course, not, silly, but I can help you pull some of it out of the depths of your memory!  Wait–let me back up a little bit.  Remember when I mentioned the other day about how we are going to be starting MAP testing in a couple of weeks? Well, one thing that we have been doing to help us prepare for the Science section of that test is to review concepts that they have learned about previously.  Because, of course, they probably wouldn’t remember all of it without a few reminders.  And pretty much anything they’ve ever learned about (yep, since 1st grade!) is fair game on this test.  So we had some work to do.

This week we went back to an activity we’d done with past units in Social Studies in our classroom.  Since I knew that it worked to help us remember big ideas and I knew they had fun doing it, I figured it was perfect to pull out again.  Plus, unfortunately, the last few units we’d been doing in Social Studies had been more of the sit-and-read-from-this-book-and-tell-me-what-you-learned type units, so they were ready for a change.

We have access to Safari Montage through our school district, which is an amazing resource for videos to supplement your curriculum.  There is a great series by Schlessinger Science Library that presents concepts in a fun and informative way with short, interesting videos.  This week we watched several videos and then created window murals to help us remember the big ideas.  We worked with a partner or in a group of 3, and created representations for each big idea on the mural.

Here’s what we’ve been working on this week–

This one was after a video called All About Plant Life:

Can you see the big ideas of leaves, roots, what plants need, how plants are different from animals, photosynthesis, and how they give us oxygen?

Next we watched a video called All About Animal Adaptations:

I wish the picture had turned out better, but this one had big ideas about how animals have to adapt to their environments to help them survive.

On Thursday, the topic was animals again, but this time Life Cycles:

And then Friday we moved on to Electricity:

It is always great to see what my students do when they are given a challenge, and how much fun they have doing it.  I loved how so many kiddos mentioned this activity when they shared in our closing circle on Friday.  The Friday question is almost always “What did you like or what did you learn?” and a majority of kiddos mentioned that they liked going back to this again.  And any time we can learn in a fun way, I’m all game.  We have more window space and more science to review, so there are surely more of these in our future next week!  I am sure my class will be just fine with that. 🙂