Falling School Supplies (Let's Try 2 Unit 5)

Many thanks to macaroniross for the idea for this lesson! My activity for the 3rd grade textbook (Let's Try 1 Unit 3) was so popular, I implemented the same idea to the 4th grade textbook for the school supplies unit, a unit that is otherwise completely devoid of merit. >.> Enjoy!

Start off by introducing or reviewing all of the school supplies for the unit. In addition to the ones in the textbook, I've added a few common ones (scissors, tape, backpack, etc.) at the request of my coordinating teacher. After this, move onto the main activity. For each question, there is a specific pencil case. I found fun pencil cases, and then decided their owners afterwards, so there are some quite interesting and surprising characters this time. Each question will ask "How many?" to review counting numbers, as well as one school supply from the current unit.

Level 1 starts off fairly easy and moves onto to medium difficulty questions by the end. Students shouldn't have much trouble counting most of this level, except the last question, in which the characters themselves are pencil cases, so the answer is 10 and not 8.

Level 2 adds at least one additional item in addition to the one you're asking for, or asks for a specific color of something, or something to this effect. In lieu of a level 3 for this activity (like I made for 3rd grade), this level ramps up in difficulty fairly quickly. Students should be able to do the first few, but towards the end, you might have to play the animation a few times for them, as it gets quite difficult to count. The last question is possibly the stupidest thing I've ever made, with two Kaiju made out of pencil cases battling it out atop Tokyo after they've destroyed their school.

I do apologize for lower quality images than I'd like to use. PowerPoint absolutely eats RAM with certain animations, and the frame rate drops horrendously if I tried to use higher quality images, so I scaled them down to get the frame rate running smoothly. If the frame rate is still a bit choppy on your computer, you might be able to fix it by selecting all the images on the problem slide and clicking the "reduce image/file size" button and reducing it to web quality (150ppi) or email quality (96ppi). This has helped me improve the frame rate, even if I'd already done this to the slide before.

The font used in this is UDデジタル教科書. It should be on all of your school computers, but I don't have it on my personal computer at home. I prefer it because it has the handwritten lowercase "a" as well as other handwriting differences, but doesn't look like garbage like Comic Sans. If you don't have it, there might be some formatting discrepancies.

Credit to the respective copyright holders for use of the characters' pictures. Credit to flaticon.com for use of the school supply icons.

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More information

Lets Try 2 Unit 5.pptx (18.9 MB)