Water Cycle Story

We are writing stories about the water cycle.  Students are using a drop of water as their character.  Their character has to have a name and feelings.  We've worked on using similes and sound words in our stories.  This story will allow us to pull those in along with demonstrating our knowledge of the water cycle.  We are also working on transitioning from one part of the story to the next without using transition words of next and then.  After the stories are done the students will get to illustrate the story using Paint.  They will create a background that will be used for every page of the story and the background has to match the setting of the story.  The stories and illustrations will be used to create a PowerPoint presentation.  Then the slides will be turned into jpg files and used to create a PhotoStory3 presentation.  This gives us the opportunity to use the PowerPoint program and PhotoStory3.

Student examples:  http://mrscooksfantasticfourthgrade.blogspot.com/2012/01/some-more-water-cycle-stories-1-2-3.html

http://mrscooksfantasticfourthgrade.blogspot.com/2011/12/water-cycle-movies.html

Word Art Collage

I went to the TRC Celebration last week and learned pictures can be used to fill letters in word art.  My brain has rolled that information around and around trying to think of a way to use that in the classroom.  One of our vocabulary words this week was collage.  We took all the pictures of the school year and created a collage.  Students created their own using pictures they were in and I let them use the jpeg files they created of their work for previous projects.  They made the collage in Publisher.  We could have used PowerPoint and the next time I'll probably just use PowerPoint.  We saved the collage as a jpeg file.  We pulled the newly created jpeg file into PowerPoint (there's probably a faster way to do this but this is the way I did it this time).  We cropped the write off of the edges and made a nice square/rectangle of the pictures.  We stretched it to fit the screen and saved it as a jpeg.  Then in a new PowerPoint file each student typed his/her name using WordArt.   (This next part I'm not as sure of as I need to do it one more time to refresh my memory - so if it doesn't work, check back as I'll update this when I get a chance.)  I think we right clicked on the word art and went to format text.  After clicking fill we clicked photo and uploaded the photo.  It's pretty cool.  We saved it as a jpeg.  In a new PowerPoint we pulled in the WordArt collage picture.  We stretched it, saved it and printed it.  I usually don't let the kids print in color for obvious reasons, but I let them print their name collage in color.  What a souvenir they have of their school year.   Someday I'll do this again...when I have a minute to think as I think we had a lot of steps we didn't need.

This can be used with vocabulary, too.  Choose pictures to illustrate a word to make a collage and then pull that collage into the word using word art.