Monday, March 6, 2017

Bring Research To Life With Fortune Tellers, PebbleGo & Cantata Learning!

Creating curious, excited and happy researchers is one of the best parts of being a teacher librarian and educator.  We look for wonderful resources, engaging activities and meaningful projects as our students learn and practice their research skills.

One of my favorite new research activities to share are the PebbleGo Fortune Tellers from Capstone!
These go along with four of the PebbleGo databases including PebbleGo Science, PebbleGo Social Studies, PebbleGo Biographies and PebbleGo Animals.
They are easy to print from any of the PebbleGo databases (I will show you where to find them below).

You can print in color or black and white to save on ink.  I printed on normal weight paper as well.
Once you have them printed, follow the Fortune Tell Instructions included at the top.

You will have to help your younger students with the instructions.  They could follow along with you as you walk through the steps.
Older students will be able to fold the Fortune Tellers themselves...and even come by to help the younger ones too.
There is even a blank PebbleGo Fortune Teller that you can fill out yourself too!  This allows you to fill it in online...the light blue areas are where you would type.  It is really cool!
As I played with the blank one, I thought about a wonderful new series from Cantata Learning that I wanted to tie in with the Plants category in PebbleGo Science.
It is the My First Science Songs series which are amazing new stories and songs from Cantata Learning.  This set of six are all about plants!
These are the newest part of the My First Science series made up of 18 science stories and songs.
 I picked Busy, Busy Leaves to focus on with the Fortune Teller activity.
I love the illustrations as they point out the different plant parts as children read and sing along.  
You will find Busy, Busy Leaves here on the Cantata Learning website.  

And remember...all of the music is available to stream or download, including the sheet music. 
As children are reading and singing, they can also learn more about leaves on PebbleGo.  There is a very nice article with several topics including Leaves, Making Food, Parts of Leaves, Kinds of Leaves and Leaves We Eat. 

Two videos are included in this article too.

Then if you look at the very bottom (where the red circle and yellow arrow are), you will see Teacher Resources.  
The Teacher Resources are packed full of awesomeness for teacher librarians and teachers including National Standards information, Lesson Plans, Reproducibles, Student Activities, Tips on Using PebbleGo and Communications to share with parents, teachers and others.

Under Student Activities, you will find the Science Fortune Teller and Create Your Own Fortune Teller.   
I now wanted to take the information from Busy, Busy Leaves and the PebbleGo Science Leaves article to create my own Fortune Teller.  It was easy and fun filling out the Fortune Teller online. 
When it was all filled in, I printed it out and folded it like the others.

This was going to be such a fantastic activity to bring the research and learning to life.
Since I used this with the Cantata Learning book, it would be really fun for the music to play for singing along as the children worked with the Fortune Teller.

How will you use the PebbleGo Fortune Tellers with your students?  We'd love to hear your ideas too! 

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