Friday, July 6, 2018

A Postcard Exchange is a Great Learning Experience!

You might want to participate in a fantastic activity for your classroom - a postcard exchange. Here is how it works: a teacher organizes an exchange, and finds 50 different teachers to sign up - each teacher represents one state in America. 
Each teacher works with their classroom to collect 50 postcards representing their state. They also brainstorm together what would be interesting to share about their state and town. The teacher organizing the exchange shares the addresses of all involved, so each teacher can easily print out and glue down the addresses onto their postcards.

On a certain date in the school year, each teacher involved in the exchange has to mail their stack of 50 postcards. What happens next is amazing! Your classroom will receive a postcard from every state!


Besides making a fantastic bulletin board, your students can learn so much with a postcard exchange. They can learn facts typed up on the postcards, see what interesting places there are to visit in each state, learn the locations of states as you track which postcards have arrived, and they can also learn about their own state as you have your students help you write a few paragraphs that will printed and glued onto all of the postcards that you will mail out.
To save on postage costs, I ask my school or district to pay the postage. I also ask each student to try and bring in 3-4 postcards. For those students that can't get to RiteAid or the local drug store and buy postcards, I have them pay me a quarter for each postcard I have bought.  Many of my students are thrilled to pay a few quarters for some postcards to mail out.

Don't buy the extra large postcard size, or your postage will be higher! 


For the past 17 years, I have been running a very popular and successful postcard exchange. The reason many people stay with our exchange for years is that everyone who signs up participates! It is very disappointing to belong to an exchange where you only receive 20 postcards instead of 50, due to low participation. 

Our postcard exchange takes all grade levels. I will send you labels so it is very easy to mail your postcards out. You will receive in November a postcard from each state and one from Canada too.

If you teach in Nebraska please send me an email to join our exchange!   franciesfocus@gmail.com

We need a teacher from NEBRASKA!

        
Be sure to include your email address and your school mailing address so I can begin corresponding with you!


If you don't see your state listed, there are other exchanges you can join. Try the Post Office posts at ProTeacher, and the Classroom Project posts at Teachers.net


Thursday, March 15, 2018

We extended our weekend contest because DonorsChoose.org was down all weekend! Three teachers will each win 5 Marble Run Extreme Sets courtesy of Marble Genius on March 17-20 during our Going Marbles and Feeling Lucky Caring Classrooms Contest! Visit the Caring Classrooms Facebook page for details: https://www.facebook.com/caringclassrooms

Do you remember the thrill of dropping a marble into a maze and watching it roll, spin, and finally end at the bottom of your run? Having your students create a marble run can be a fantastic learning experience for your students, and it makes a great STEM project, too. Believe it or not, you might even be able to the materials for this project absolutely free!

I recently decided to have my 3rd graders design and test marble runs as a part of my Forces and Interactions science unit. I developed the activity to address the Next Generation Science Standard 3-PS2-1: "Plan and conduct an investigation to provide evidence of the effects of balanced and unbalanced forces on the motion of an object."

When I began looking for materials, I discovered the Marble Run Extreme kit from Marble Genius which looked like the perfect resource for this STEM activity. I was going to order a kit from Amazon.com, but after noticing that many reviewers were able to purchase the kit at a reduced price, I emailed the company to ask about getting a discount. I ended up with something even better than a discount... they offered to send me a kit for free! I also ordered a set of six stopwatches from Amazon that my students could wear around their necks so they could time their runs and make adjustments.

For our first class experience with marble runs, we had large teams and I separated the kit so every team had the essential parts for their marble runs. After the activity, I contacted Marble Genius to thank them, and I raved about their Marble Run Extreme kit. I couldn't believe it when Jeff Forgrave, the founder of the company, emailed me back and offered to send me 10 more kits for free! One kit isn't really enough for an entire class, and he wanted my students to experience a true hands-on STEM lesson where every child could participate in designing, building, and testing marble runs.

After the kits arrived, I had classroom parents label every piece so I could easily put them back together again. Each kit includes 125 translucent plastic pieces and 20 marbles, so it was easy to make sure every group had essential pieces to create their marble run. I rolled up our classroom rugs and put them in the hallway so the marble runs would have stability on our floor.

The Challenge: Building the Slowest Marble Run
When it was time to start the activity, I divided my students into small cooperative learning groups and challenged them to design the SLOWEST run! I gave each team a set of marble run materials including a stopwatch, and I could feel the excitement and urgency in the room as each team worked on trying to build the slowest marble run in the classroom.

I loved hearing the excitement in my room as I watched how focused and engaged my students were, from high achievers to struggling students. One team discovered that the circular shape with the hole in the middle is perfect for slowing down the marble. I had the rest of the class watch that team’s marble run in action, and I challenged the other teams to match their time and increase it!


Every team wanted to time their run and change their design so they could increase the time it took for their marble to complete its run. Both boys and girls worked together on their marble runs, and had no difficulties making adjustments to the configuration of their marble runs.

Besides creating a run with the slowest time, we tried some other runs. One activity required the students to use all the pieces they were given to create the fastest run, and another criteria was to choose 5 pieces that could be removed from the kit that would help the run to be even faster.

Creating marble runs was fun for my students, and they really loved the activity. But what I liked best was the fact that they were experimenting and making critical thinking choices while exploring Next Generation Science Standard concepts related to forces and interactions!

Marble Run Extreme Kits 
The Marble Run Extreme kits worked great for this activity! The pieces are easy to assemble, sturdy, and made of colorful transparent plastic! My third graders are 9 years old, and the kits were so easy to use that none of them asked for my help putting their Marble Runs together. We loved watching the marbles as they traveled their way through the run because this kit features transparent plastic, making it extremely easy to watch and film the journey. Because I labeled the parts of each kit, putting the pieces away in the correctly labeled box was easy to do.

If you do this activity with your students, I recommend purchasing several kits so you'll have plenty of materials for your students to use when designing their marble runs. The more marble run kits you order, the more pieces each team has to work with. A total of 4-5 kits would be perfect for a classroom of 25 students so there would be lots of pieces for each team to work with.

If you order enough kits, you could even create a Makerspace in your classroom where your students can design their own Ultimate Marble Runs any way they want to!