Who’s New at the GeoZoo?

Students in Mrs. Sharp’s 5th Grade class created creatures using their geometry skills to populate “The Geo-zoo.”  Mrs. Sharp had done the activity years before using paper and shapes, but wanted to engage her students by using the iPads.  We quickly were able to transfer the activity to a digital one.

Last Year’s Paper Version

Digital Version

Thanks to the iPad apps Geoboard, Pic Collage, and Dropbox, students were able to complete a project based activity (that normally was done as a homework project) within one class period.  By the end of class time, Mrs. Sharp had a great understanding of her students’ strengths with Math SOL 5.13 (The student, using plane figures (square, rectangle, triangle, parallelogram, rhombus, and trapezoid), will develop definitions of these plane figures; and investigate and describe the results of combining and subdividing plane figures.)

Check out the process below:

The best part was that the students were completely engaged and absolutely loved their creations!  Many even posted them on their blogs :

Rock Star Laser Robot by Double O Cleo

The Triangle Vampire from by Minecraft02

Tari the Tri-con by I Love Lax

The Tri-Liger by Iron Claw

Here are few examples of their awesome work:

If you are interested in doing a similar activity with your class, here is our STEM (Children’s Engineering) design brief and a couple versions of rubrics.

Design Brief

Rubric 1

Rubric 2

Let me know how it goes! And…if you are at one of my schools, I’d love to come in to help! Ask me! :)

 

Great Ready-to-Go K-5 iPad Units on iTunes U!

Have you checked out the courses lately in iTunes University?  The teachers at Boyne City Schools have been busy.  They have created a wide variety of iTunes U Courses on subjects that are suitable for elementary schools.  If you haven’t taken a look, make sure you do!  These courses contain activities using video, audio, ibooks, and apps.  They also include project based activities.  You do need an iPad or iPod Touch to really use these courses.  Here are a few of my favorite:

And I love their course for teachers and principals on Flipping Professional Development!

Take a look at the news article about students using these courses in class.  But don’t worry, you don’t need your students to have their very own iPads (thought it would be SO nice if they did).  These lessons would still work great with the carts we have.

Boyne City is in Michigan, so they are using Common Core Standards.  That means that some of these units might work for other grade levels in Virginia than indicated.

If you are a teacher at one of my schools and would like to use any part of these courses with your students, let me know.  I’ll make sure the course is loaded on the iPads at your school!

 

 

 

 

Flocabulary (Hip Hop Videos for the Classroom)

Have you heard of Flocabulary? It’s a website that does hip hop songs to help students remember certain facts. It started with SAT vocab, but has expanded to all levels and subjects. To have access to all the videos/songs you need to pay a fee, but a few are free…including the one for Egypt, which you can watch here.

Note the lyrics below the song (they are clickable) and the resources to go with it on the right hand side of the page. I will warn you…you will be singing the chorus to this in your head all day after you hear it, or at least I did! :)

There are other free videos too worth checking out on the site, including Confessions of a Planet (Space), On Trial! (Test Taking Vocabulary), Let Freedom Ring (Civil Rights), This Ain’t Working (American Revolution), Place Value, Scientific Method of Madness, and more!  There is a vocabulary section broken down by grade level and tons of other great videos in the paid version. You can also download songs in iTunes (for $.99 each).  Take a look (and listen).  I think you will love these!

 

App Spotlight: PicCollage

I absolutely LOVE  Pic-Collage because it can be used in any subject or grade level. Think virtual poster.  It’s safe (you can turn off the ability to pull pictures from the web in settings), and it’s FREE.  It’s pretty intuitive if you play around with it, but just in case, here’s a tutorial on how to use it:

Pic Collage for IPad and IPhone Tutorial from Roben-Marie Smith on Vimeo.

Check out the following posts for examples of how it has been used so far in classrooms:

Figurative Language with Second Grade

Pic Collage in 4th Grade

I would LOVE to help you and your students learn how to use this app!!  It’s so fun and easy, and the kids love it!

 

Pic Collage in Fourth Grade

Students in Mrs. Mulvaney’s and Mrs. Downey’s class have been reading a book about the San Francisco Earthquake.  Mrs. Downey created an activity where students used iPads to demonstrate their understanding of the parts of a non-fiction book, as well as a few concepts from the book itself.  These students had worked with Pic Collage before when creating bat posters, but this is the first time they worked on a project without any technology support from me.  They did a wonderful job and even posted their creations on their blogs!  Check out a few examples below! If you would, while you are checking them out, leave a comment!  The student’s love to get comments on their work!

Kesha M

Merlin-S

Polar Bear

Tstey-Pooch

 

 

 

 

 

Famous People Glogs

Mrs. McGee’s class has been working hard on Glog using Glogster EDU to demonstrate their understanding of the famous people they have studied.  After a quick tutorial on how to use the programs, Mrs. McGee and her students were off and running.  Here are a few examples of their hard work.  Click on the top right corner icon to see them full size.

You can see all the class’ glogs on this wiki: McGee’s Class

Figurative Language with Second Grade

For the past few days, I’ve had the chance to work with a reading group in Mrs. Allen’s Class.  This group of students had read the book, Punished by David Lubar.  I had never read this book, but the kids LOVED it and were so excited to tell me about it.  The main character of the story is “punished” when talking back to the reference guy in the library and has to find different types of figurative language to lift the magical punishment.  The book covers types of figurative language (oxymorons, palindromes, anagrams, and puns).  Mrs. Allen wanted her students to practice creating (or finding) these types of words.

After brainstorming with the group of students, we decided that they would make a virtual poster (using iPads) containing an example of each word.  Students used the iPads to research and take (or find) pictures of the different word types.  As they went along, they kept a list of the examples they found so they would be ready to create their poster.

On day two, students used one of my favorite apps, PicCollage, to create their figurative language posters.  They were given this sheet to help them.  Below are the posters they created.

 

They did such a great job.  I had a blast watching their excitement over the project. Way to go Mrs. Allen’s Class!