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

A new project

I know, I know....I'm behind.  Here's one project we recently completed.  It was difficult to accomplish the way I wanted as I was continually pulled out of my classroom for various reasons.  In spite of the difficulties, the students did a great job.  The students studied the water cycle.  Their task was to tell the story of the water cycle and use a drop of water as a character in the story.  They used Paint to illustrate the story and PowerPoint was used to tell the story.  I was amazed at how well they did with the illustrations.  A basic illustration was created and saved.  That file was then saved as a part of the water cycle...for simplicity let's call it evaporation.  The student then illustrated evaporation on the on basic illustration.  That was saved (as evaporation).  Then the evaporation file was saved as condensation.  The condensation file was illustrated with condensation.  The condensation file was saved and then saved as precipitation.  Precipitation was added to the illustration.  The file was saved and then saved as collection.  The collection file had an arrow added to point to the area of the illustration showing collection.  The file was saved.  The illustrations were pulled into Power Point and the students used the basic illustration for a title page.  Each of the other illustrations were pulled in as the student told the story.  Some students created their character using paint and then added the character to their slides to help illustrate the story.