1st & 2nd Grade Quick Pic Communities

As we head toward the end of the year and open house, one activity we do is create a community (after we spend a lot of time learning about them). Students are divided into groups and they choose a type of community (urban, rural, desert, mountain, jungle, and beach). To start they brainstorm what they would see in their given community. I give them categories such as homes, other buildings, animals, fun places, and plants.

In the past students within a given community group have simply talked about the categories and written notes if they wanted to, the goal being to all have the same mindset about the community before they create anything. This year I gave each student an iTouch or an iPad and assigned them to 1 of the categories above. They had 5 minutes to draw a quick picture of what the home/building/animals, etc. in their community would look like. Then, within their community group they shared their drawing and talked about it with the rest of their group.

Here's a house drawing from the rural group (made of wood, nothing else around it, plain and not decorated).

1st & 2nd Grade Write About This App

My students enjoyed a new app today, Write About This. We tried the free version, but I love it so much I think we'll buy the paid version. Next year I can see alternating this app one day a week with free writing in response to a Wonderopolis topic. There are enough pictures in Write About This to last a year, I would just vary the writing format.

Students selected a topic of interest to them and then chose a prompt. I appreciate the 3 levels of prompts (going up Bloom's Taxonomy) and I encouraged all my students to start with the level 3 prompt and only go down to level 2 or 1 if they didn't understand the prompt or were unsure of what to write. Of my 24 students only 2 opted to write about a prompt that wasn't at level 3.

The level 3 prompts did require a more detailed response. Most of my students didn't have time in their 20 min block to fully answer all parts of the question (oh I wish they could type faster).  Allowing them 30 min would have been a better time frame, too bad we had to move on to state testing.

1st Grade Solids in Water Educreations

First grade students had a great time putting various solids (raisins, rice, sugar, cookie, cloth, popsicle stick, chalk, beans, plastic cube, and salt) into containers of water. The recorded results after 5 minutes on paper and then 24 hours later they divided the solids into groups using Tools4Students based on whether the solid dissolved, became mushy but still visible, or stayed in the original solid form (noting changes that did occur such as looking darker). In addition, students each picked a solid and created an Educreations explaining what had happened to their solid.

http://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/solids/7569584/?s=RMC8jN&ref=appemail

Students removed as much of the water as possible from each solid and graphed on the whiteboard how many days it took for all the water to evaporate from the different solids.

2nd Grade Ask3

My 2nd grade students have used Ask3 for 3 assignments now.

Initially they used the app to answer a question about recess. The goal was for them to familiarize themselves with the app and understand their commenting options and how their feedback could be incorporated into a video or picture I assigned.

The second assignment was to create their own video about balancing acts they could do with a spoon and egg. For example, balance the egg on the spoon while passing the spoon behind their back or under a raised leg. In addition to creating their own video, they commented on the video of at least 1 peer.

This week I had photos of rural, urban, and suburban communities in the app. I asked students to identify the clues in each photo that led them to identify what type of community they were looking at.

1st Grade Counting Coins Skitch and Pic Collage

The first grade students are counting coins. I asked each of them to grab a handful, lay the coins out, and take a photo. They imported the photo into Skitch and labelled the coins, showing how they could count on to determine the total amount of money they had. They repeated this process 2-3 times and created a poster in Pic Collage. Good ah, ha for me...I needed to remind them (which I did after Pic Collage products started arriving in my in box) to start with the larger coins and end with the smaller coins. Somehow I wasn't getting all the poster sent via email, just a portion...gotta love technology.

2nd Grade Explaining Community Types Strip Design

We are nearing the end of our communities unit, soon it will be time to create communities. To show understanding of differences between community types students used Tools4Students as a planning tool. From their they took their favorite 1 or 2 distinctions for each community (rural, suburban, urban) and included it in captions to go with photos imported into Strip Design.

2nd Grade Syllable Rules with Magnetic ABC

We are getting ready for STAR testing next week with a lot of review. This past week students reviewed 4 syllable rules (words ending in -le, words with a double consonant, rule to break after a short vowel, and rule to break after a long vowel).  Pairs of students used the Magnetic ABC to show the syllable division of 2 syllable words. Rather than give them a list of words, I asked them to think of their own, using inspiration from around the classroom and from books.