Teaching Eachother about KidPix

In kindergarten and first grade this week, we had the opportunity to explore Kid Pix.  Kid Pix is a drawing program aimed at young students.  It provides kids with  the perfect environment for exploration, self expression, and pride of accomplishment. Kids can create unique art, add special effects, import photos or movies, and produce slide shows.

Students were provided with a period of time to explore the program and teach their peers about the variety of tools one can use.  It was great to watch them take ownership and teach eachother.  After sharing we began conversations about how we can create products and save them.  You can take the opportunity to have your children teach you about how the program works by referring to the image below.

Students also had the opportunity to watch a short video produced by Jing, a screen capture program, that explained how to save to their own personal folder.  We look forward to learning more about how to save and reopen products we are working on.  This will transfer to using other writing and drawing programs.  

Learning about our Ancestors in Second Grade

Second graders are learning about ancestors as part of their Social Studies curriculum. This week, we watched a video on ancestors and then used the program Kidspiration to create a graphic organizer that shows how family members are related. Students are learning to correctly add pictures and capital letters to their graphic organizers.

Testing our Rock Knowledge

This week fourth graders are exploring a website called "Rock Hounds." They are taking a pretest or posttest, depending on what they have learned so far in their classroom, on their rock knowledge. Then they are learning how to do a print preview to print the results of their quiz. Then they are taking their paper version of the quiz and using the website to correct their work. This is helping students learn how to effectively read and locate information online.

Learning the Letter Sounds - Kindergarten

In kindergarten, we have been using short video clips created by a company called Have Fun Teaching.  Mark, who has taught elementary school since 2005, began creating lessons, activites, and videos that meet individual needs of elemenaty students.  After using many Internet based resources, Mark decided to create his own site with a variety of resources for teachers and families.  Some of these resources are free to use and are a great supplement to learning at home.  Click on the image below to check out his site:

During computers, kindergarten students have enjoyed listening to a variety of his short video clips that introduce letter sounds.  They are quiet addictive...and are a great way to build background knowledge.  You can check out the "Letter T" video here and search for others on YouTube.

Getting to Know Technology

Our school is home to an interactive quiz system called CPS. We used this "clicker" system to review and teach general technology terms and knowledge that we have been working on since our first lesson in September. Using what looks like a remote control, each student pushes a button to submit what they think is the correct answer to each problem on the quiz. Then the class is able to instantly see the correct answer and how many classmates chose each multiple choice answer. In the end, the system allows you to view how the class scored as a whole and how individual students scored on the quiz.

Halloween Fun

To continue our Halloween celebration, many children in all grades, completed a Halloween word search. Through this fun activity we were able to touch upon both technology and literacy skills including:

1. Mouse skills-drag and drop to find the answer
2. Review of how a word search is setup including the vocabulary (horizontal-across, vertical-down, and diagonal)
3. Reading words associated with Halloween
   
4. Strategies for finding words-looking at initial consonants or consonant blends, middle vowel sounds, unusual letter patterns in words, ending of words
5. Eliminating answers
6. Trouble-shooting when you have no sound in your headphones
7. Locating a link in the Activities folder

Skills addressed in the lesson varied up on the grade level using the word search. There is also an option of a more challenging word search for older children.

Third and Fourth Grade

In October, third and fourth graders,discussed the importance of typing skills in our digital world. We used the typing program Type to Learn 4 (TTL4) to view our typing goals and progress. Most students at the third and fourth grade level are currently working towards learning to type around 15 words a minute with 85% accuracy. We also discussed how accuracy and words per minute are terms we use when learning to read well. We are using TTL4 to track our individual progress over the year and to practice typing skills. This program runs differently for each student depending on what goals and needs they need to address to become a fluent typist. We are using specific skill lessons as a whole class in isolation to build the same typing skills across grade levels. See the typing links with in each grade level to practice at home.

Second Grade

This month, we are working learning how to use the number pad on the keyboard. Students are learning that the keypad on the computer keyboard is similar to the keypad on a calculator. If students are familiar with the placement of the numbers on the computer keyboard, then they are better able to play math games on the computer to practice math facts. Second graders had a chance to look at their typing speed and accuracy of typing numbers and then they played the game Parminder the Plate Spinner in order to improve their number typing skills.

Halloween Mouse Skills & Vowels

In the lab this past week we worked on refining our mouse skills in kindergarten and first grade.  One site we enjoyed using for this was a virtual pumpkin carving site.  Here we practiced clicking and dragging to make a jack-o-lantern.  Some first grade classrooms even carved some site words into their pumpkins.  It was great fun!  As a compliment to this, we reviewed short vowels in first grade as part of our halloween fun!

Virtual Pumpkin Carving

Identifying Vowel Sounds