CSI: GEMS! Crime Lab Chemistry, Fingerprinting, and Mystery Festival

This session will introduce you to the three “crime/mystery” solving guides from GEMS. In

Crime Lab Chemistry you’ll get hands-on experience with paper chromatography. Hands-on

fingerprinting activities will reinforce observation and classification skills. Finally, an overview

of the GEMS Mystery Festival guide includes a look at the mysteries and the various crime lab

stations that provide your student detectives with clues and evidence to solve the mysteries.

Focus: 3-8

GEMS: Frog Math

Be charmed by this very popular GEMS guide. Frog Math is an artful weaving of mathematics

and literature using one of the “Frog and Toad” stories as your starting point. Students will “hop”

through engaging activities, gaining skills such as observing, predicting, describing, classifying,

estimating, recording data, and using logic and probability to develop thinking strategies.

Focus: K-3

GEMS: In All Probability

This guide taps into your students’ real-world experiences and engages them in exciting

investigations. Join us for this session as we play games with coins, spinners, and dice. This

guide will help your students develop standards-based mathematics literacy in data analysis and

probability.

Focus: 3-5

GEMS:  Math on the Menu

You and your students are invited to give the fictional Rosada Family your input as they start

planning and creating their family-owned restaurants. This GEMS guide provides compelling

and memorable mathematics learning experiences for students. The activities will ask you to help

the Rosadas plan their menu, determine different combinations of ingredients, analyze costs and

set prices, expand into combination plates and design the restaurant.

Focus:  3-5

You Don’t Have to be an Artist to Teach Art!

Don’t be art-phobic in your classroom! This session will give you suggestions for how to bring

famous artists and their works to life for you and your students. Learn a variety of literacy

strategies that will help you create picture perfect lessons that ultimately lead you to creating

your own artist-inspired masterpieces.

Focus: 3-6

Vocabulary and Comprehension Strategies for Low Language Learners

Research tells us that by fourth grade, low language children’s reading comprehension scores

start a drastic decline. What can we do about this? This session will introduce you to easy-to-

implement strategies designed to boost all students in the areas of reading comprehension and

word knowledge. Focus: 3-6