Westward Expansion Board Game Webquest

For our next unit of Social Studies, we'll be studying westward expansion and, in my silly infatuations with webquests, I've created one that leads students to create a board game covering one of four topics: Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea; the Oregon Trail; the Pony Express; and the Transcontinental Railroad. These all correspond to migration which ties into our Core ELA study of Esperanza Rising. Hopefully, students will be getting really comfortable with the format of a webquest so that it's even more student centered and less teacher supported compared to our mock trials. Let me know if you make use of it! I'd love to know how it turned out. Here are links to the planning pages in English and Spanish and then click the button for the webquest pptx file itself. Make sure you're downloading everything to your computer from Google Docs instead of just printing from there (the formatting will be different).

Short vs. Long A Game

This year, we're using two word study approaches during a 20 minute block of our morning: word patterns (Words Their Way) and vocabulary study (Flocabulary) Because we have three teachers, we have three groups of words study based off of the elementary spelling inventory from words their way. We are also using Flocabulary to make sure our ELLs are learning the much needed tier two vocabulary. We switch off each day from Words Their Way and Flocab every two weeks with assessments on the Thursday and Friday during the second week. For my Within Word Pattern Spellers, I created a "Space Race" game to review their long a vs. short a (sort 7) words. I created the file in PowerPoint because it's much easier to align and organize images than Word (as I've just recently learned about). I plan on adding more games as I create more for the students every new sorting cycle--you can buy the file now for a major discount by the end of the year!