The Earth's Oceans

I've changed up how I am doing the notebooks just a little as an experiment. For pages 32 and 33, instead of having the students write down a daily essential question on the left side, I gave the students a list of objectives which they attach to the left side (p. 32). It should be attached in a way that will allow it to be flipped up so they can still do a left side activity underneath it. Responses are then written on the right side (p. 33) as notes.

Topics we covered are: Divisions of Oceans, How the oceans were formed, properties of ocean water, the ocean and the water cycle, temperature zones in the ocean, effect of climate on salinity (one of the properties of water), how the ocean helps regulate the temperature of the earth.

HOMEWORK: I will be checking to see that students complete a left side activity on p. 32 in their notebooks. We discussed possible activities that could be done for the left side as a class: CD Cover/Label, timeline of movement of continents, mnemonic devices to remember relative sizes of the oceans.
I also introduced a new type of poem called a cinquain. A cinquain is a 5 line poem that has a particular number of syllables or words for each line. The most basic is 2,8,6,4,2. Here is an example I showed in class based on syllables:

Oceans (2)
Salinity changes often. (8)
Evaporation--Hot! (6)
Rivers add fresh (4)
Moving (2)

If you look up cinquain on wikipedia, it gives a large variety of types cinquains.