 Hello my friends! Welcome back to another Apples and Tiaras vlog. Today is Tuesday, February 15th and we are working on science! Yay! So today is the second to last lesson in my energy unit on mystery science. I'm really excited to move past energy. So I'm just gonna kind of flip you around and show you what we're working on today. So today we are investigating how heat energy can create movement and so what the kiddos will be doing is they will be making these really cool spinners and they will investigate how heat energy can create movement in the spinner. So they will they will be able to see that heat rises and that when it is placed above heat it spins. When it's next to heat or below it it doesn't spin and so they actually get to see how like when you lift it up it spins and stuff like that. So they're doing a bunch of investigations with their spinners. So breathing on it they learn that air can cause movement and then they actually get to design a couple of things and invent a chain reaction machine using air and heat and then they experiment with their spinners at the two heat stations. So you can see that and then they do some seat work while the other kids are investigating as well. So I feel that I'll be ready to wrap up energy and have them take a test next week. Fingers crossed! But yeah so yesterday was Valentine's Day and I did not vlog for many reasons. I tend to do things a little bit differently with Valentine's Day now that I've departmentalized because I have about 75 students and I say about because it's slightly more than 75 but it is difficult for me to be able to afford like Valentine's gifts for 75 students so I really don't purchase gifts for my students or do anything like that. But I do always do a secret cupid which I really love and you either love it or you hate it. But basically it is just like Secret Santa and the fact that the kids purchase a gift for one student and I like to make it fair. I have the kids fill out a survey that explains all of their favorite things so like their favorite snacks, their favorite treats, their favorite colors, their favorite animal, things like that so that their secret cupid can then go out and buy them a little gift and so I like to do that. I always get permission from parents like if I don't have the parents involved then I like if majority of the parents can't participate or can't purchase gifts for their secret buddy then I usually like don't do it but every year I have high high involvement. So this year I did actually have four students who could not purchase gifts and so between Mandy and I we went ahead and purchased those gifts for those students and it was really nice one of my students moms had heard that I was going to be purchasing gifts for a couple of kids and so she sent me a $20 gift card to Walmart so that I wouldn't have to fork up the money for that. I thought that was really really sweet of her and just very generous and kind and extremely helpful because most of you who are teachers you know that that couple days right before payday I mean if you're like me you are just scraping by I mean I'm down to like dollars in my bank account until Friday so that kind of weak but anyways I'm just collecting notebooks because we were kind of in a rush to get out of here the first block always rushes out because they do the majority of the work for these mysteries they have to like create these items that we use to experiment with like today they had to build these and my next class won't have to build these so I almost feel like my first block like I need a little bit more time with them because they usually set up the majority of the investigation and then the next two classes have it easy like today the first class made these and then the rest of the classes all they're going to have to do is make their spinners so that's going to cut down like at least 10 to 15 minutes of that and so they're going to have plenty of time to finish the activity I'm just grabbing my tripod because I keep forgetting that it's up here so yeah so then um after we did our Valentine's Day gift exchange um the rest of the day I did centers with my other classes and then when I got my homeroom class back we just did a pancake and movie party so we watched En canto is literally their favorite thing they were all singing the songs um and then we just made pancakes so I just bought pancake mix I brought in some pink food coloring and we made pink colored pancakes so that was really fun um and they were delicious and then the afternoon was recessed so it was a really calm day um I really don't like teaching a lesson on Valentine's Day especially because I'm the science teacher like I try to do investigations and stuff like that like a scientific thing but what I really wanted to do to this time was just do some STEM centers it just makes the day move a little bit faster and it's less stressful for me and it's less stressful for the kids because then I'm not having to correct behaviors because of all of the candy that they're eating and stuff like that I just try to make it really low stress and um I don't usually teach a lesson on Valentine's Day so anyway I am sitting here trying to plan and grade and do all of the things I have one more lesson in mystery science to do for energy and then I'll be wrapping that up and then I am working on social studies right now we're doing Mayan culture and history so I'm getting ready to do some role play with them and um assign each one of them a role in the society and then they have to write a narrative about their day in the life of that Mayan role so that'll be really cool and the kids get really into it they like to like role play out at recess and it's kind of fun so anyways yeah that is what's going on today yesterday my boys were homesick with I think there's a stomach bug going around um both of them were throwing up they didn't drink or eat anything all day long because obviously um but I'm fine um there's no COVID or anything like that but um they were homesick yesterday so I was just kind of like you know staying strong for everyone and making sure everybody was taking care of so anyways yeah that's what's happening one sense breathe gently on your spinner from one side what happens so one of you blow on it so what does it do spin so right it spins everyone should be participating so from straight above so stand up here blow from up here good morning guys happy Friday today is Friday February 25th I know I haven't vlogged in forever so I figured today would be just a catch up day I'm not really sure what's going on with my hairdo today so again happy Friday um nothing really new has been going on since the last time I saw you guys so it has been really really cold here in Arizona this week and I am absolutely loving it I am like a winter girl at heart winter and deep fall are like my two favorite seasons because I love bundling up in a scarf and a jacket and it's just the best so like winters in the phoenix area of Arizona in the desert or the valley are my favorite it's like 46 degrees out right now and it's like chilly you get to like snuggle up and I just love it yesterday it was really really cold in fact some people thought that they saw snow falling on the ground here which is amazing um and so I am like in my element everybody else around here is like oh my gosh what is this cold like this isn't normal we live in Arizona and I'm like enjoy it it's only gonna last like five minutes so anyway I have been really enjoying the cold okay we're here so if you guys are new here my name is charlotte and I am a fourth grade science and social studies teacher in the valley area of Arizona so some of the latest developments in Arizona education have been pretty rotten if you ask me um the last thing I heard now don't quote me on any of this because I don't really watch the news I don't really pay attention to the news I don't really read the news and that's just a personal preference um I just don't really spend my time harping on any of that information but from what I have heard Arizona has moved up to the 47th slot in education yay for us I think we moved up from like 49th or something I don't know maybe I'm wrong but 47 ain't as bad as like 50 you know or you know 52 or 50 or any of that so that's awesome also we got word last or on Wednesday that our pay dates have been pushed forward so we are going to be not getting a full paycheck until August 5th even though school starts July 22nd yay so um or not I don't know about 22nd but like the week of the 22nd so that's really nice not um it's going to put a lot of teachers in a bind and it's going to be bad because we get our last paycheck in May that's going almost three entire months without pay so that'll be an interesting one let's see what's going on in my class today today my students are taking their energy final so we wrapped up our unit on energy so basically all almost all of my physical science standards we have wrapped them up and I am going to assess them today I'm using a school city test which is like our district's test to analyze growth I don't really usually give these but I thought that I would give it a try since my two teammates math and ELA both have to give a benchmark next week I thought I might as well warm the kids up by giving them one this week on science and then it feels like they're being assessed in all three classes using that system so I went ahead and did that also by the way I'm finishing up some Chipotle that I ordered for lunch yesterday so right now in social studies we have been studying mesoamerica and I've been kind of covering the different civilizations in different weeks and we are still working on the Mayan civilization so I found this reader's theater pack now this isn't the cover anything but it's by the lit classroom on teachers pay teachers and it is a five act play that has at least five characters in each act and each act is concentrated on a different like part of the society so we have like religion and pyramids hieroglyphs and art the calendar the ball game and then the mysterious ending so um the kids are able to act out and kind of like role play different roles in the Mayan society and then it's cool there's like discussion questions at the end of each act that the kids can answer and there's a quiz on the whole play at the end so the kids have to actually pay attention to the other acts when they're watching them which is really cool so we're we've been working on this we started this yesterday after the test today I'm gonna let the kids get into their groups and I'm gonna try to send like one group at a time out into the hallway to practice blocking and I'll kind of work with them on what blocking is so we're doing that today and we'll probably be doing that most of next week and I actually gave the kids homework I'm having them memorize their lines so it's kind of like a fun way to introduce them to theater and it's really cool to see some of the kids starting to like shine in like the dramatic arts another thing that I really want to do next week are these Maya Empire puzzle stations they're really cool they encompass the um the hieroglyphs and different codes and messages that they have to decode and it's kind of like an escape room so I might try and use this either next week or the week after because I think I'm gonna hold off on science for the rest of the quarter since we only have a couple of weeks left until spring break and then I also have this one which is a kids life in ancient Maya so I might use that too all of these can be found on teachers by teachers I don't remember exactly where but if you look up Maya fourth grade or Mayan fourth grade it will probably pop right up another thing that I've been trying to be proactive about is getting all of my mystery science materials printed ahead of time so that next year all I have to do is pull the um the master copies and I'm also planning on sending all of the handouts to the printing pros people so basically there's this system at our high school where teachers can send um their copies to the there's like a whole bunch of students student aides that work in this printing pros it's like a job they work there and they can run massive copies of things so like I have about 80 students not about I say 80 because I always round up that way I have enough extras in case someone loses something or in case I get a new student or for any other reason and so I think I'm gonna send as many of these worksheets out or not worksheets but like the the pages that the kids use so like all of the paper stuff that is needed for mystery science for next year I'm gonna send it out ahead of time and have it pre-copied and then file it in my filing cabinet so that next year I don't have to make a copy of anything it's done okay I feel like I've been talking a bajillion miles a minute I'm gonna finish my breakfast and then catch up with whatever goes on next