Heather DeBuse

This is a novel unit for the book Pedro's Journal. The book is about Christopher Columbus' journey to America as told from a ship's boy, Pedro. The unit has vocabulary activities, comprehension questions, and creative writing activities.

This reading guide is to be used with the book, The Matchlock Gun. This is historical fiction that relates to colonial life and the French & Indian War. The vocabulary is challenging, but it is a short book. I have used it with advanced 3rd graders, but would imagine it is more generally apporpriate for grades 4-5. It's a great book!

In this fun review lesson, students are required to add, subtract, multiply, divide and simplify fractions in order to figure out the measurements to the brownie recipe. Then, they are required to figure out the recipe for MORE people and FEWER people. The worksheet includes the recipe. I did this with my 4th graders, and they absolutely loved it!

This fun activity uses Skittles candies to practice data collection and analysis skills. Students find mean, mode, median, and range; they count and graph their candies. This could be a performance based assessment at the end of a data analysis unit. Grades 4-5

This assignment is for the short novel Freckle Juice by Judy Blume. There are vocabulary activities and comprehension questions for each chapter, as well as a drawing activity and a writing prompt for after the book.

Students practice rounding skills with this fun game. This can also be a math workshop center with minor edits (no partner). Directions: You need a partner (or two) and 4 dice. 1. Roll your dice. Make a 4-digit number. Write it in the first column of the record sheet. 2. Spin the spinner to see what place value to round your number. After you round, add that to the middle column. 3. Give yourself ONE point if your number is higher than your partner’s. No points are earned if your partner’s

This social studies activity is to be used as a performance based assessment. Students should have background knowledge of the Ark and Dove journey in relation to the settlement of Maryland and St. Mary's City. It is to be used in conjunction with My Maryland Adventure textbook, level 4. The finished products look wonderful on the bulletin board.

Students will get lots of practice with math skills and writing skills; organization, ideas, spelling, mechanics. This lesson can be modified to be used with various grades. Students use a model text to create their own stories that include mathematical problems.

This activity is a math and social studies activity. Students will use census data to identify the top 10 most populated U.S. cities. They will use the data to round and order the populations, create a table, and label a map. *Differentiation- Students add 10 smallest U.S. cities to their table and map, and make a map key.

This activity teaches students how to identify and apply number patterns. Included is Pascal's Triangle and Fibonacci sequence. Grades 3-5.

This activity was created to use with my 3rd graders at the end of the school year. We were doing fractions up until the very last day of school, and I wanted to do something FUN! They loved drawing the picture. Actually, I graded the worksheet, then most students drew the picture on a bigger piece of paper. The final projects make for a great summer bulletin board, too! I would also use this activity as a warmup (or benchmark) for the beginning of the year 4th graders. Obviously, you could chan

This game is a supplement to Singapore Math (3A) lesson 2.1a... mental math addition strategies. The game is played with a deck of cards and the record sheet.

This is a daily journal activity that I made for my 3rd graders. I would say that it could easily be used for an advanced student in 1st or 2nd grade or number sense remediation for upper grades. It is a good addition to Singapore Math. I have an enlarged version (I used the overhead and a piece of tagboard; then laminate) on my white board, and at the end of class, we fill it in and discuss as a class. You could use "number of the day" concept with this (first day of school is 1, second day of

This is a daily journal activity that I made for my 3rd graders. I would say that it could easily be used for an advanced student in 1st or 2nd grade or number sense remediation for upper grades. It is a good addition to Singapore Math. I have an enlarged version (I used the overhead and a piece of tagboard; then laminate) on my white board, and at the end of class, we fill it in and discuss as a class. You could use "number of the day" concept with this (first day of school is 1, second day of

This card game uses decks of cards to help students pracitice calculating mean (averaging). Grades 4-5

This test accompanies the PEDRO'S JOURNAL reading unit.

This activity can be used throughout the book OR after the book has been read. These 25 words are important to the main ideas of the book. The first part of the activity is to have students define the words (on the paper given). The last page is a BINGO board. After the words have been checked, the students should write the words on the BINGO board in whatever order they wish. This way everyone has a different board set-up. The teacher will call out the definitions, and students use a chip to ma

Worksheet in which students must evaluate expressions with exponents. Grades 4-5

Pedro's Journal test ANSWERS

This guide goes along with the Reading Guide as part of a differentiated approach to Literature Circles. Students choose their own vocabulary words OR the teacher can assign specific words. The guide is broken up into sections (word & part of speech, context clues, student's proposed definition, and actual definition). Again, this is an active activity, as it requires students to THINK about words within the context of the text.