1st Graders Practice Adjectives with Snowmen

To continue the snowman theme, students drew a snowman in Drawing Pad, My Story or Popplet and then labelled different parts using an adjective, a part of speech we're working on at the moment.

1st Graders Create a Non-Snowman

My 1st graders spent a lot of time this week on snowman and snow globe activities. From a SCAMPER activity I found online last year I asked each of them to create a snowman out of something other than snow. They drew their creation in Drawing Pad or My Story and then wrote about it (if they drew in Drawing Pad they imported to Strip Design for writing). I asked each student to tell me what their snowman was made of (many renamed them to match the building material), the advantages of using this material, and the disadvantages of using this material.

2nd Graders Use Popplet to Outline a Personal Narrative

Generally I ask students to outline writing assignments on a piece of paper. For a "what I did during December break" personal narrative, they switched it up and create a popple in the Popplet app for each activity they wanted to write about. Each popple became a "yellow detail sentence" (we use Step Up to Writing) when they transferred their ideas to paragraph form.

1st and 2nd Graders Logical Solutions App

This week my students used a new app called Logical Solutions. They worked at their own pace to drag the pictures to the correct box based on the arrows and minimal written directions. This is the 1st time I've used this app and I really like it. It was easy for all students to understand what they needed to do. Within the 100 problems of level 1 none of my students had difficulty. They played for about 15 minutes and reached level 15-60, depending on the student.

2nd Graders Cause and Effect About Themselves

While reading Freckle Juice we talked a lot about cause and effect. I asked each student to use My Story and create a cause/effect pair about themselves.

2nd Graders Pictoral Summary of Animals in Winter

After reading Animals in Winter by Henrietta Bancroft pairs of students came up with the main ideas of the book (most came up with migration, hibernation, storing food, and how kids can help). They used Drawing Pad or My Story to create a picture representation of each main idea, no words allowed.  A next step will be to trade with a different group and have that group look at the picture, think about the book, and add a caption.

2nd Graders Create an Ad for a New Product

After reading Freckle Juice by Judy Blume each student created a magical product of their own. They used Drawing Pad to create a magazine ad that could help sell their product. We talked a lot about persuasion and looked at existing magazine ads before starting.