Island of the Blue Dolphins

 

 

Students in Mrs. Becker’s Class created Virtual Posters after Reading Island of the Blue Dolphins.  I absolutely love how these turned out.  Students drew pictures, and then used the Pic Collage app on the iPads to take pictures of their illustrations.  They layered them on top of each other, added the text, and added the background.  It’s a great mix of student art work and digital work.  I love them!

Students even posted them to their blogs.  Take a look the link below, and leave them a comment or two on their great work!

Island of the Blue Dolphin Virtual Posters

 

 

 

Cross posted on the Oak Grove Digital Library

Video Book Reports

Students in Mrs. Bralley’s class created Video Book Reports.  They wrote scripts, recorded videos on the iPads, and took pictures of themselves holding their books.  After their videos were uploaded to Vimeo, they created QR codes to link to them.  Mrs. Bralley hung their pictures with the QR codes in the hall so people could scan them and listen to their book reports.  You can find their videos here: Video Book Reports   It was a great project!

Cross posted on the Oak Grove Digital Archive.

Read, Give, and Share Books Online!

wegivebooksI just found an amazing free resource and I wanted to pass it on to all of you. We Give Books is a free online library of children’s books that enables your kids to help other children around the world while they’re reading. The best part is, your reading will directly impact the great work of non-profit organizations around the world! Their tagline says it all, “combining the joy of reading with the power of giving.” It’s the perfect tool for parents, teachers, caregivers, and anyone who loves children’s books!

When you go to www.wegivebooks.org, you’ll be able to read a special selection of books without a We Give Books account, but you have to sign up to access their full library. It’s definitely worth it, though. It’s just a quick form, and once you’re signed up, you’ll have access to over 150 quality children’s books! There are a lot of familiar classic titles, and even more new ones for us to discover. You can sort the books by age level, genre, author, and seasonal selections in the “Featured” section, so everyone can find something they like.

On the Causes page you can learn more about where your donated books are going. This fall, We Give Books is focusing on early childhood literacy across the United States and supporting great causes like Jumpstart for young children. In the winter, you’ll be able to read to support global literacy and give books to non-profits like Room to Read. They also give you the option to donate to help your book donations reach even more children.

We Give Books is a program of the Pearson Foundation and Penguin Group. Penguin works with its authors to provide an outstanding selection of online books while the Pearson Foundation donates print books to charity partners. We Give Books is a great way to get your children excited about reading and to teach them about the importance of helping others.

A Wild, Wonderful World

Students in Mr. Ryder’s class embarked on a project allowing them to explore the world around Oak Grove Elementary, searching for hidden beauty and wonder.  It was based on the story Wild Shots, written by Tui De Roy for Ranger Rick magazine.  In the article, Tui shared her “Up-Close and Personal” approach to nature photography.  During a four session project, students used iPads to take pictures of things animals, plants, or anything that fascinated them.

They created descriptions about their pictures using the app, Popplet.  Then using the app Videolicious, they created a slide show with their pictures and descriptions.  On the final day of the project, they presented their slide show to the class.  To display them in the hall, they posted their popplets with QR code links to their videos.

 

Here’s one example:

Watch the example video here.

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You can see all the project on the Oak Grove Digital Library, complete with Popplets and Videos!  Please take a look.  The kids are so proud of their work.

 

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!

 

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!

More Popplets!

Students in Mrs. Mulvaney and Mrs. Downey’s Language Arts Class are at it again!  This time they created Cause and Effect Popplets about the book Rosa Parks: Freedom Rider.   Many of them blog with different teachers, but you can see their work by clicking on the links below.

They were excited to learn how to post their work to their own blog too.  Keep an eye out for more projects by this class!

Learning about Rosa Parks with iPads

This past week, fourth graders at in Mrs. Mulvaney’s, Mrs. Downey’s, and Mrs. Wallace’s reading class have  been learning about Rosa Parks while reading the book, Rosa Parks Freedom Rider by Keith Brandt and Joanne Mattern.

To augment what they were learning in the book, they also practiced research skills to learn more about her. They used Mobicip, Popplet, and Videolicious to create videos about the facts they learned.

The project started with Mobicip. Because Safari is not filtered very much in our school system, we have opted to use Mobicip instead. Mobicip looks a lot like Safari (with tabs and a search box) and allows students to save images in the same way. Students practiced finding relevant websites to find facts about Rosa Parks and saved copyright friendly pictures of her to the iPad Camera roll.

Once students had saved pictures and done their research, they used Popplet to create a concept map. This concept map wouldserve as a storyboard for their Videolicious videos.
Finally, students partnered up. One student opened up the popplet they had created on one iPad and the other student opened up Videolicious on the other ipad. The students choose the pictures they wanted for their video. Then, the second student videoed the first student while he or she used their popplet as a guide.

  

 

It was great fun and the students learned a lot…and it was very easy. It was nice to be able to research, brainstorm, and create all on the iPad right in the classroom.

This project also made it easy to see where there were gabs in the knowledge of students, which teachers then could address.

Take a look at a few of their final projects!

Rosa Parks Example 1
Rosa Parks Example 2