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The Adjective Detective

What it is: The Adjective Detective is a fun way for your students to learn more about adjectives, superlative adjectives, and comparative adjectives.  This interactive learning module, game, and quiz comes from the Children’s University of Manchester site (I have written about it before here).  Last week I was searching high and low for some good adjective interactives for my students and was pleasantly surprised to rediscover this one.  I knew if the activity had fallen off of my radar, chances were that others had forgotten it, too.  The Adjective Detecive offers students a in-depth, interactive mini lesson on adjectives, superlative adjectives, and comparative adjectives.  After students work their way through the lessons, they can play an adjective game as a detective.  They must hunt down adjectives in the sentence by clicking on it with their magnifying glass.  Students recieve immediate feedback on their answer.  When they are finished playing the game, students can answer multiple choice questions about adjectives in an online quiz. How to integrate Adjective Detective into the classroom: Use the Adjective Detective mini-lessons to teach your whole class about adjectives.  Put the site up on your interactive whiteboard or projector and discuss the different kinds of adjectives with your students.  The site could also be used for self guided learning (I am personally a big advocate of this!) as a computer center in the classroom or individually in the lab setting.  After students complete the mini lessons, encourage them to play the adjective detective game.  In my classroom I want students to enter the spirit of play and have a few detective hats, magnifying glasses, and mini notebooks.  Students can play “detective”, hunting down adjectives in sentences.  On the interactive whiteboard, the student at the board can find an adjective that the rest of the class writes down as an adjective clue in their notebooks.  Then we pass the detective job onto the next student, until all of the adjectives in the game have been discovered.  You could alternatively send students to the classroom computers as a grammar center where the students become “detectives” and jot down their adjective clues while they are at the center.  The multiple choice quiz lends itself nicely to assessing understanding with clickers (student response systems).  The quiz can also be taken individually on the classroom computers.  I like learning sites, like this, that allow students to work through learning at their own pace and offer immediate feedback so that students can monitor their own understanding. Tips: Check out the rest of the Children’s University of Manchester website for other good interative lessons. Please leave a comment and share how you are using The Adjective Detective in your classroom.

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Send Your Name to Mars

Posted by admin | Posted in Fun & Games, Interactive Whiteboard, Middle/High School, Primary Elementary, Science, Secondary Elementary, Teacher Resources, Virtual Field Trips, Websites | Posted on 30-03-2009

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What it is:  This is your chance to send your students to Mars!  Okay, maybe not literally but you can send their names to Mars.  NASA has done this before, you may have sent your names to the moon in the past.  Now you and your students have the opportunity to send their names to Mars by way of a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011.

How to integrate Send Your Name to Mars into the classroom:  This is a great way to get your students excited about a space unit!  Students can start the space unit by sending their name in to be put on the microchip going to Mars and print out the “official” certificate.   Follow up this activity by exploring the NASA website or NASA Kids to learn more about the Mars Science Laboratory rover and the mission.  If you don’t have access to a computer for each student, you could send your class name to Mars and explore the NASA site as a class using a projector.  As an extension activity, you can have students write about what they think it would be like to go to Mars.

 

Tips:  Take a look at the participation map, it is interesting to see who is going to Mars!

 

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Send Your Name to Mars in your classroom.

Comments (1)

The Best Sites For Learning About Planets & Space | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... said on 24-04-2009

[...] I have to admit I’ve had students in my classes who I would occasionally like to send to Mars, but NASA has a neat activity where you really can send them there! As NASA’s site says “This is your chance to go to Mars! Fill in your information below and your name will be included with others on a microchip on the Mars Science Laboratory rover heading to Mars in 2011!”  Students can then print-out the official certificate, and explore the site to learn more about the Mars Mission (thanks to iLearn Technology for the tip). [...]

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