Winter Session Week 7

B1-2 Technology:

We love shiny teeth! In fact, we took digital pictures of ours to make into an animoto video to put on our tooth tally wiki pages-just scroll down on the tally page and click on our Fort Craig classrooms to check it out and keep track of our missing and wobbly teeth for the next few months. We love lots of things besides teeth, though, and practiced inserting motion clips and clip art photos into a "Things I Love" powerpoint slide for our Winter Wonderland Wiki project. We also had fun sending Jan Brett Valentine emails to our teachers and playing some Fun School valentine games.

3-4 Technology:
This week we explored a new site- GoAnimate4Schools. Students went through the animation tutorial and then began using their biography research to create an animation using their famous person talking and giving their autobiography-also a good chance to discuss the differences between biography and autobiography! There was lots of excitement as students played around with the different special effects, voices, and actions.
We finished up our class by watching some of the Jeopardy match with Watson, the IBM supercomputer and discussing how computer technology continues to change.

Check out our Tooth Fairy Voicethreads!

Mrs. Storie's Class:


Mrs. Sinclair's Class:


Mrs. Connell's Class:


Mrs. Dotson's Class:


Mrs. Barham's Class:


Mrs. Keyl's Class:

Winter Session Week 6

B1-2 Technology:
This week we started work on our tooth tally voicethreads. I took digital photos of the tooth fairy picture that the students drew last week and uploaded them to voicethread. In class, students took turns recording their voice describing what they thought the tooth fairy did with all the teeth she collected! I should have the final project ready to post on the blog soon. While students waited for their turn, they watched The Magic Schoolbus Gets Programmed to find out what is really going on inside a computer.

3-4 Technology:
Continuing our research for a biography project, this week the students used bighugelabs to create a trading card of their famous person. I was really proud of the perserverence of these kids as they dealt with numerous technical difficulties we experienced in the lab this week! Everyone should finish by next week, and then we can have fun trading!

Computer Challenge #2- Make a Doodle 4 Google!

Google is having a contest for kids to create a doodle based on the theme "Someday I want to..." Pick up a template in the lab or print out here and bring it back to me by Feb. 28 so I can register you. Not sure what a doodle is? Here are some great ones from the past.

Winter Session Week 5

B1-2:

We are participating in the Tooth Tally Project with over 250 classes around the world! For the next 3 months we will be keeping track of lost and wiggly teeth as well as doing some other activities. This week we listened to the tumblebook Abra Cadabra, The Tooth Witch. We drew a picture of the tooth fairy based on a description given by the Tooth Tally Project. We will use our pictures next week in a Voicethread presentation where we discuss what the tooth fairy does with all those teeth. After our pictures were finished, we went back to our computers for some fun tooth games like Squanky the Tooth Taker, Plaque Attack, and Whack a Molar.

3-4:
This week the students began some research for a Biography project. First, we discussed some internet search techniques and watched this great youtube video from Commoncraft.
4th graders are researching a famous Tennessean and 3rd graders are researching the person they checked a book out about last week in library. Our goal this week was to get 5 facts and to save a picture of the person in our folder. We also talked about the Doodle4Google contest-I hope some of you enter!

Winter Session Week 4

B1-2:
I am so proud of the emerging keyboarding skills these little guys are showing! Youngers are doing very well with "home row fingers" and the olders are starting to progress at their own pace through the levels of Dance Mat. This week we participated in another project for the Winter Wonderland Wiki called Mitten Math. We watched a story video of Jan Brett reading her book, The Mitten.
We reviewed the sequence of events in the story with a type of Thinking Map called a Flow Map and students completed a math PowerPoint based on the story. Any extra time at the end of class was spent with our favorite snowflake creator, Make a Flake.

3-4 Technology:

We are starting to get some members in the "Underwear Club." When students pass level 10 of Type to Learn, I restart them at level 1 but give them our unique keyboard covers-boxers (unused, of course!).

After keyboarding, we reviewed what makes a quality blog comment with this wonderful video by Mrs. Yollis and her star bloggers. 

We spent some time adding our own quality comments to our friends' blogs and then learned how to use Image Chef to make a fun blog post about Winter. Here is an example.

ImageChef.com Poetry Blender

Winter Session Week 3

B1-2 Technology:
Fort Craig B1-2 students are part of the nationwide Winter Wonderland Wiki where we can collaborate on all sorts of winter projects. You can see our wiki page here. This week we listened to the Tumblebook Martin MacGregor's Snowman and then learned how to comment on a voki to talk about what we like to do in Winter. Click the little comment bubble to see some student comment vokis.


3-4 Technology:
First, Type to Learn! We are moving through those levels! After our keyboarding practice, we watched a short Youtube video called "A Chance of Flurries."

Students used a type of thinking map called a Bubble Map to describe snow-they also learned how to use the thesaurus tool on Microsoft Word to get better adjectives. After they completed the bubbles, they used to wonderful site Make a Flake to make a snowflake which could be inserted behind their bubble. The results looked something like this: