WOW! I am blogging! It's been awhile! Life has been crazy and it hasn't calmed down, but I wanted to stop by and tell you all about something super cool my kids have been working on!
Our main focus the later half of last week and this week was character traits. From my experience, this is a hard skill for kids to understand right away!
I wanted to do something that used 21st century skills and was super engaging! I nailed it! I have never seen my kiddos so engaged then they were during these activities! Remind you, I looped this year so I have some of my same kids:)
To begin with character traits, we talked about ourselves! We made a poster of words that could describe a person!
Then we picked 5 words that described us and made an accordion mini me:)
Next, we did a class study on Tacky the Penguin! As a class, we came up with some traits that described Tacky. They LOVED him! We made a super cute poster for the board.
I set uploaded a Google Presentation in their classroom Hapara accounts for each student to access. Do you have a Hapara account for your students? Our school has it set up for us by the tech coordinator! Every student 3-5 has their own email through gmail!
I have taught the kids how to log into their email, access their Google Drive, and get into their folders set up through Hapara.
From there, students open the assignment to open! Students worked together in their pairs to type in their presentation. Next, I had students create a word cloud in ABCya. They LOVE this! And they caught on SO quick.
Once they were done with their word cloud, I taught them how to take a screen shot by holding down command, alt and 4 at the same time. About 90% got the hang of it right away...a few needed to practice.
After they took a screen shot we learned how to insert a picture and how to just drag it in! They amazed me with how fast they got all this and how well they were all on task and working.
Finally we added our names by inserting a text box!
I put day 1 and day 2 pictures in a flipgram! Check them out below!
Day 2
Here are some slides from their final group Google Presentation! I am so proud:)
This took two days! I really wanted to see what they could do next! So we did almost the same thing this week.
On Monday, I broke the class up into 6 groups. Each group was given a Kevin Henkes book!
First, they read the book
Second, they made a group character trait poster
Third, they reread the book to see if they were missing anything
Fourth, they each decided which character trait they wanted to write about...so now it became an individual presentation!
That is where each student now individually logged into their email, accessed Google Drive, their Hapara folder, got into Google Presentation, found their slide, typed their work, made a word cloud, took a screen shot, and dragged it in! WOW...I am tired just saying all of that!
Funny side story...I was helping a little boy today with his picture and it wasn't working. He looks at me and says, "Having a hard time with that picture? #pictureproblems" YES...he said #pictureproblems! SOOOOO FUNNY! I died laughing!
Anyways! This part took all week! And that was OK! Here are pictures from this week!
At the end of the day I showed then how to make their slide pretty:) Adding color, transitions, fun things! We will do that next week!
If you are interested in the sheet I used for kids to write on first, I got it here for free from Workshop Classroom! It was perfect!
This weekend I am working on something so cool with technology! I have big plans for my kids to be using technology to do their literacy centers/Daily 5 activities! I can't wait to blog about it and show you all my plans!
As you can see, my focus this year is to incorporate into technology into a lot of my teaching! I love the comment my school's librarian made on our schools G+ community in regards to my post I made with these videos!
"Love how the technology isn't the focus of the lesson, the character traits are! Your kids were successful because you walked them through character traits--from identifying their own traits & sharing them through art and then moving into a class discussion of Tacky the Penguin. Who doesn't love Tacky? Thanks for sharing!"
This is my goal:)
I hope you all have a great weekend!
