What To Do With All the Halloween Candy

Happy Halloween!  I hope you all are having fun despite the crazy buzz of excitement and sugar rushes that come with this holiday.  Today I'm posting a fun way to use up some of your students candy besides consume it.  CandyExperiments has simple science experiments you can do with some of the excessive treats that kids collect.  Here are five of my favorite experiments...

1) Chocolate Bloom--students expose their chocolate bars to different temperatures and see what happens when the ingredients start to separate.

2) Life Saver Sparks--students eat life savers in the dark in front of a mirror and watch what happens.

3) Candy Bar Bath--students test candy bars to see which sink and which float.  Then they predict why.

4) Harvesting S's and M's--students pull the letters off of Skittles and M&M's.

5) Hidden Sugars--students learn to read labels and, hopefully, rethink some of their food choices.

This could be done in class or sent home as an experiment.  I doubt many parents would mind seeing the candy being used for the sake of education instead of tooth decay!

Have fun.  Be safe.  Let us know if you try it and how it goes.  We'd love to hear your feedback.

Vocabulary and the Common Core

One of my favorite books on teaching vocabulary across the K-12 spectrum is this book: Vocabulary for the Common Core by Marzano and Simms.  If you are looking for a book that lays out tier two (general academic) vocabulary and tier three (content specific) vocabulary that is necessary for unpacking the common core across the grade levels, this is a worthwhile $30 investment.  There are a lot of lists in the book, but there are also a lot of great ideas.  Chapter two lays out steps for teaching vocabulary that helps students access meanings of words at their deepest level.  It unpacks what definitions do and do not provide, and how it is critical that we dive deeper into what words are suggesting, how they are used, and how they connect to other concepts. There are straight forward activities, including several pages of game ideas that will teach vocabulary while hitting on other standards (like listening and speaking).  I highly recommend it.

45 Pages of Spanish Unit One Activities

Check out Excellence in Teaching and Learning.  There you'll find a number of printable activities at reasonable prices to use for centers, exams, quizzes, homework, class work, sub plans, etc.  Unit I materials cover the vocabulary for numbers, greetings, calendar and time.


The activities include Spanish Centers: Introductory Unit, Spanish Centers: Greetings, Spanish Centers: Los Numeros, an 80 page compilation of activities, and much, much more (including 5 brand new activities).

Everything comes with answer key and/or rubrics.  And, at $1-5, everything is priced to sell.  Don't reinvent the wheel, creating activities.  Check out the store's digital resources today!