New Projects - ABC Measurement Book/Character Trait & Avatar

I want to make an ABC book using measurement terms.  I'm struggling with how to pull technology in to this besides the obvious use of using the computer as a word processor.  (Does that sentence make sense???)  What should the final product be?  A powerpoint?  A paper copy of a  book?  Ideas anyone?

We are getting ready to create a character and describe a trait about the character.  The reader of the paragraph should be able to guess the character's trait based on the description of the character and/or character activities.  The actual word for the trait cannot be used in the paragraph.  I did this last year and they were great.  This year the students are going to make an avatar of some kind to go with the description.  I have a student teacher who will do this project with the class.  I'm looking forward to seeing the end product.

Google Search Story

We finished our search stories.  Here's a link to them.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrsCook387

Now we are helping the third graders create stories about Wichita.

Here's the link to make your own.
http://www.youtube.com/user/SearchStories

PhotoStory3

The students are close to finishing their PhotoStory3 projects.  After reading Snowflake Bentley students came up with facts about snow.  Because of snow days and other interruptions to our time we chose three facts as a class and then in our teams students worked on a storyboard to create their PhotoStory.  Originally I wanted each student to create his/her own story.

We used PowerPoint to create 8 slides.  Slide 1 is the title slide, slide 2 has the first fact on it, slide 3 is for the fact from slide 2 turned into an opinion, slide 3 has the second fact on it, and that continues until slide 8.  Slide 8 is the credit slide.  The book Snowflake Bentley is listed along with a website we will use for snow pictures.  The website contains copyright free pictures.  Once the slides were created (pictures were NOT added to the powerpoint and the slides with the opinions did not have the opinions written yet) they were printed.  As a team students wrote the narrative for each slide by the slide on the printed paper.  The opinion slides had the opinion written by hand in the slide.

Once the students have their storyboard completed they will choose the picture to go with the facts and opinions.  A picture will be selected for the title and credit slides, too.  The picture information will be noted on the slide.  Then students will create the PhotoStory3 using the information from their storyboards.  Each team is responsible for one PhotoStory.

The projects should be finished this week...which is good as we are starting a new project - the one described in the previous post.

Google SearchStory

This coming week we are going to start a new project to practice main idea and details.  January is the birth month of Kansas so students will use information about Kansas to create a main idea and detail list.  The list will then be used to create a Google SearchStory that ends up on Youtube.  I'll post a link to our creations when we are done.

We read a book about Kansas and listed important and interesting things after each page.  Next we will choose one idea from the list to create a main idea and supporting details.  I think I will ask students to write a paragraph using the information to put with the SearchStory.

Publisher

We've used Publisher a lot this year for story mapping, webs and more.  We use callouts to create webs.  They amazed me the other day when we created a web to document the main idea and details of an article.  Wow, we just breezed through it. 

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.

TRC Project

Sometimes I get ideas in my head that I should be shot for having...I thought it would be great fun to make a fact/opinion game with the students.  Fact/opinion is one area that the students struggle with on the state test so why not use some of the technology available and do something fun while reinforcing the concept of fact/opinion?  One of my teaching partners is doing this with me...so her class is involved, too.  We used a template of a gameboard found on the internet using PowerPoint.  The students loved rearranging the boxes, changing the color (shades of gray, no color printer) and adding pictures of animals to their boards.  Each child chose a animal as a theme for the board and for their fact/opinion statement game cards.  We went to copyright friendly web sites for pictures and I created a search engine using Google for them.  The search engine only searched specific sites I selected.  I let each of my students create a game, my teaching partner buddied her kids up.  It was a LOT of work on the students' part and mine.  The games are done, now we need some time to play them.  Was it worth all of the time?  Well, I'll wait to comment until after we play the games and after the state test.  The kids are proud of the games so I'm leaning towards it was worth the time.