Mixing Up Something New

I hooked up with my blogger buddy over at Head Over Heels For Teaching with Spark Student Motivation!  Something that I did this week seemed to spark student motivation! I created stations for my fifth graders to help them foster independence, time management, and study skills!  This week flew by and was sooo busy I can't believe it. I really wanted to try some new things after break and so getting a great idea from Ari at the Science Penguin. She teaches science down there in Texas. Her kiddos are lucky, she is very creative. I was reading her blog and I saw that she does stations and then works with a group for direct instruction. Love that idea. Soooo, I tried it myself. I set up 5 stations for my kiddos using the FOSS bones. We defined mixtures and solutions with one of Ari's sheet I got from TPT, then we also did a QR code review practicing how we would separate ingredients. I had three stations that also had them working as a team to separate three different sets of ingredients one where they had to use magnetism and even review with qr codes...
















One, where they had to use a filter and flotation...

And one where they had to choose from a bucket and then separate it themselves using one of the six methods we studied: filter, evaporation, screen, chromatography, magnetism, and flotation.
 
If you want to take a look at the stations, I have them for you on my TPT Store with my Mixtures and Solutions Pack. Just trying to find ways for my older kiddos to self guide themselves. We did fist to five and they all seemed to love the lesson. Hope it helps their test scores next week...we shall see.