Who can read about the Toucan?

When I was little, my dad always read me bedtime stories.  We would read fairy tales, chapter books, picture books, and even poems!  My favorite poems were in the book "Where the Sidewalk Ends" by Shel Silverstein.  Shel Silverstein is very witty and his poems are very humorous.  My dad and I would laugh until our stomachs hurt as we read poem after poem.  The poem, "The Toucan", is one of my personal favorites. This poem brings back cherished memories of my childhood bedtime stories with my dad.

For my Children's Literature class, we had to choose our favorite poem and make a visually appealing bookmark.  I found this assignment very fun.  I think that this assignment would be great to use with elementary students when introducing poetry.  It allows the students to be creative in making their bookmark. This assignment allows them to independently choose their favorite poem.

Here are the instructions

I am excited to do this activity in the future in my classroom.  Of course with time, I may change a few things here and there.  I might even add onto this activity.  But I enjoyed it, and so I will hang onto this activity for the future.  Here are a few pictures of my book mark!

{In my assignment, the poem was required on the bookmark}

• Activity was adapted from Professor Annapurna Ganesh in Children's Literature (EDU 291) class.
• Poem was taken from the book, "Where the Sidewalk Ends".

  Silverstein, Shel. "The Toucan." Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems & Drawings of                            Shel Silverstein. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. 92. Print.

Bar Graphs with Cupcakes

Check out this video that I recently made.  I hope you like it!  Tell me what you think.

Music - Mindy Gledhill, Crazy Love

Dots in a Graph

We have been learning a lot about graphs lately...and I find scatter plots very interesting!  Scatter plots represent the relationship between two sets of data.  Instead of bars and lines, scatter plots use dots to show the data points.  Within the scatter plot, there can be a trend line.  A trend line is a line that can closely fit the majority of the data.

This scatter plot is an example of a positive trend line. 

As you can see, the dots look like they are getting higher.  They are traveling upward and increasing.  This is why it is considered a positive correlation scatter plot.

In addition to the positive scatter plot, we also have a negative scatter plot.

This is considered a negative correlation scatter plot.  If we look at the direction of the line, you can see that it is heading downward.  The numbers are decreasing as you follow the line.  The trend line for this graph would follow the dots and be considered a negative trend line.

Positive and negative correlation are not the only type of scatter plots, there is also no correlation.

In this particular scatter plot, the dots are not in any order.  We couldn't use a trend line (like we were talking about earlier) because we couldn't create a line for the majority of the data.  This scatter plot doesn't look like it is positive or negative.  That is why scatter plots, such as the one above, have no correlation.

Here is a site that gives examples about each type of scatter plot.  I found it very helpful and interesting!

Have a great day!

Scatter Plot pictures found here.