2nd Grade Comparing Igneous Rocks

During our rock unit rather than write in science journals I am asking students to record observations in Educreations. The unit we are working on involves a lot of comparing and observing of rocks, not a lot of action. I think that makes it perfect for an iPad activity because in past years students have become very bored by the 4th or 5th worksheet asking them to describe what they see. They have observed various igneous rocks dry, wet rocks, river rocks, and done a lot of sorts. Here's a sample of an Educreations video created after observing 3 types of igneous rocks.

http://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/rocks/3779087/?s=lfEYDH&ref=appemail

1st and 2nd Grade--December Break Popplet

We had a great first week back at school. Of course we spent a lot of time talking about everyone's vacations, new toys, fun playdates, etc. To give them something to remember their break by, each student created a Popplet of their vacation. I found it interesting that none (!) of my 24 students wanted to include photos or drawings, all of them chose text-only webs.

First and Second Grade Create Their Own Curious George Story

During the week students read various Curious George stories. We spent time comparing and contrasting them (Tools4Students) as well as dissecting them, talking about the pattern of George being curious, creating a problem and the problem being solved.

Next we brainstormed all the ways George could get into trouble if he visited our classroom for the day. Pairs of students each choose 1 of the events from the list. They wrote up part of the story explaining what George did and how he resolved the trouble he caused. We strung the 12 different story events together and created a class story beginning and ending. Students photographed George causing trouble. They imported the photos into Educreations and each pair read their part of the story.

Unfortunately we had to use multiple Educreations segments because we can't email anything longer than 3 minutes. Also, given that we recorded on the last day of school before winter break and before the class party, the reading quality is not as good as it might be--students were not really interested in re-doing or practicing their parts.  However, it was fun and accomplished story writing and cooperation goals.

A segment from the middle of the story, George causes trouble twice

Second Grade Final Family Heritage Project

As a culminating project to our family heritage unit, students created a Strip Design with 8 boxes. Each box included a photo, screenshot, or picture drawn in DrawingPad as well as a caption explaining the illustration. The topics for the boxes were flag of an ancestor's county (found from the Country Flags app), map of an ancestor's country (from Kid Countries app), a family heirloom, culture from an ancestor's country, family tradition, food from an ancestor's country, and facts about a maternal and paternal ancestor.

Once the StripDesign was complete students saved each of the 2 4 box pages as an image and imported them to Educreations. On Educreations they read a paragraph they had written about the 3 favorite things they had learned about their family during the unit.

Overall the project was time-consuming, about 1 1/2 hours, but the finished products were amazing.

First Grade--The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School Retell

At the beginning of the week my first grade students read The Gingerbread Loose in the School by Laura Murray. Then I asked pairs to draw the gingerbread man in DrawingPad, import it into either Sonic Pic or Educreations, and retell the story.

First Grade Haiku Deck

The week before break my first grade students tried Haiku Deck for the first time. I have wanted them to create a presentation, but Keynote has seemed a bit involved. Haiku Deck is perfect. All students were able to create a 3-5 slide presentation in 20 minutes, depending on how long they took choosing photos and their typing speed.

Haiku Deck makes creating slides very easy. There are about 5 fonts to choose from in the free version and about 10 layout possibilities. Students can type in "main idea" and a "detail" boxes and add 1 photo per slide from either the camera roll or photos provided by Haiku Deck (there must be thousands of those). The app is rated 12+ but when I played around with searching Haiku Deck photos I didn't find anything that was inappropriate. I did tell students they had to tell the search term they were going to use before they did it. Animals were especially popular and I asked students to use adjectives to describe the photos.

Students had a great time and were really disappointed when the activity time was done. This is a great go-to app for "showing what they know" in a visual format with topic highlights.

http://www.haikudeck.com/p/324ORUEvj7

1st and 2nd Grade--Trading Cards App

The week before our December break my students tried the Trading Card app by ReadWriteThink for the first time. They used it in centers and therefore only had 15 minutes before it was time to move on. This was definitely not enough time, 30 minutes would be ideal to get high quality answers in all the fields.  The student example below, done by a 2nd grader, shows 3/4 of the boxes complete with some answers very brief. However, the 15 minutes was enough time for them to understand the app and complete a few of the boxes.

The app has several trading card options, including person, place, and event. I asked students to choose and complete the object trading card. The front and back of the card each have different writeable boxes, which differ based on the trading card. A great feature is that when a student hovers over each box directions pop up that give a guiding question to help them complete the box. This is great because it allows students to be more self-sufficient. Even my first grade students were able to read and follow the pop-ups (although all of them are reading at mid-2nd grade level or above).

This is definitely an app we'll use frequently!