Digital Literacy with Samples

We did the same basic digital literacy lesson this year as last year. However, last year all groups chose to use the camera app to create their stories, so I couldn't include any samples. This year there were more groups that selected PuppetPals HD or MyCreate.

Diary of an Insect

I first wrote about this activity back in June, 2012 and the assignment has been basically the same since then--after reading Diary of a Fly use an app and create your own diary entries as either a silkworm or butterfly (we study both those insects in class). I have always left the app choice open, with the stipulation that students had to type diary entries (so they had to select an app with this capability). Back in 2012 almost every student chose Popplet as their app of choice. This year Drawing Pad/Timeline or Drawing Pad/ThingLink or Drawing Pad/Pages were the top winners.

Dash and Dot Activities

This week my students worked on Dash and Dot robot activities. We had 6 robots so the students were in groups of 3-4 and they had 30 minutes for each activity.

Monday--free exploration with Path and Blockly

Tuesday--create a maze on butcher paper then program Dash to navigate the maze. At different points in the maze (indicated by symbols on the paper) have Dash stop and make a sound or light up

Wednesday--program Dash to draw a square, rectangle, triangle, pentagon, and other shapes of your choice. Determine the degrees needed for angles of each shape. Also, program Dash to solve math equations. For example, forward 25 then stop then forward 38 equals 63

Thursday--on a grid drawn on butcher paper place Lego towers. Program Dash to knock down the towers

Friday--use the xylophone to create a song and put words to it to match a science unit's content.

Aurasma for Open House

We have open house coming up this week. Students have been taking advantage of Aurasma to really explain many of their pieces of work. Aurasma provides a fantastic way for students to link an explanation or opinion video about a physical object in the classroom to the object itself. While we used Aurasma for a few open house items last year we are using it much more this year to hopefully provide a more rich understanding of activities for parents and visitors.

Update to June 3, 2012 Who Would Win Activity

As we have done for several years, students read a Who Would Win book by Jerry Pallotta. Rather than using the Pro/con Tools4Students chart to organize their text evidence I had students use Skitch. They took a photo of the checklist in the back of the book and used Skitch to annotate. For each category they provided text evidence and then checked off the winning animal. They used this information as the graphic organizer to write a paragraph.

Walk-a-thon Summary Project

We had our annual school walk-a-thon and silent auction at the end of April. It's a busy Saturday filled with food, games, walking, and other activities. The week after the walk-a-thon students used My Story and created a book about the event. In addition to writing a personal narrative they created a word cloud of how they felt during the day, a timeline of events, a map of the school, a money word problem,and a graph based on a question they asked the class.

Stop Animation Walk-a-thon "Title"

We had a school walk-a-thon last weekend and throughout this week students created different parts of a walk-a-thon book using My Story. I wasn't thinking clearly and mixed-up my app capabilities when I asked students to create a stop animation to be their project title (My Story can't import video). Despite the fact that the stop animations can't be used as the project "title page" students were very creative in their use of supplies to spell out WATSA (our walk-a-thon acronym). They used scraps of paper, colored pencils, blocks, and Legos.

Pic Collage Poster of Human Body System Facts

Over the last month we've been reading books, doing puzzles, playing games, and doing activities related to 5 body systems--circulatory, muscular, skeletal, digestive, and respiratory. For each system students created a Popplet. This week they put all their Popplets together into a Pic Collage.

Response to Fortunately by Remy Charlip

After I read the story Fortunately by Remy Charlip aloud, students used Strip Design to create their own fortunately/unfortunately story.