Transportation, Recreation and Communication

This year, thanks to our wonderful District Library Instructional Coordinator and her love of social studies, our 1st grade research unit was kicked up a notch.  I blogged about this research project last year here.  The kids and teachers liked it, but this year was so much more fun.

The unit was designed as a Guided Inquiry project so we started off with by talking about the students.  How old they were, what was considered the past, the present and the future for them.  We used a strip of 10 blocks and had them number up to their current age (the present).  Anything before that was the past and anything after that was the future.  Then we glued that into a paper journal I had made.  The 10 strip was a great visual for them and I really think it helped to cement the concept. 

 They were shocked when I brought out my timeline and showed them all 42 of my squares.  You would think I was 110!  We talked about how my past is longer than theirs because I am older.  They of course wanted to know when on the timeline I was in 1st grade and when I became a librarian, etc.  

Then I showed them Discovery Education Boards that my assistant and I each had made about what transportation, recreation and communication was like when we were in first grade.  

I loved this because we could put our own pictures, or find some on the web and we could use a recording app on the ipad to read our writing and embedded that on the board to read to them also.  My assistant is 10 years older than I am so it was interesting for them to see the difference in that short amount of time.  

In the next lesson, I had picture cards for each group of pictures of communication, transportation and recreation items.  I told the kids they needed to sort the 12 cards into 3 groups.  They did need some guidance for that but once they got one of the groups, the could go from there.  Then I read them the book Hornbook and Inkwells by Verla Kay

and we talked about the different transportation, communication and recreation items that we saw in the book.  We took notes about the book in our journals.  

For the 3rd lesson, our district library services had bought each of us some items for the kids to explore with.  I had a slate and chalk, quill and ink(feathers and black tempra paint), clay to make marbles, ABC dice, wood dice with numbers, a ball and cup toy, a buzz saw and spinning tops.  The kids really enjoyed the hands on opportunity to get to use things.  More than once I heard from the quill ink station, "Boy am I glad we have pencils now!  This is hard!"  

For the final lesson, we took a lot at Pebble-go Social Studies and took some more notes on the Colonial Times and Now.  Then the students had to write a sentence or two in their journals about what they had learned.  Then they used the iPad to take a picture of an item that went with their sentence and then narrate the picture in the educreations app.  

I am so glad that we were able to have so much fun with this research.  It is a crazy time of year though and trying to fit this in right now with all the "other" stuff going on was a bit challenging, but I think the kids enjoyed it and have a better understanding of communication, recreation and transportation in the past.

Technology Tuesday: Amelia Bedelia Homographs

Third grade teachers needed books on homophones, homonyms and homographs last week which gave me the perfect opportunity to pitch a lesson idea using Educreations on the iPads.  In the past I had done a paper and pen version of this activity but I thought Educreations would be the perfect tool to digitize it.

 First, I read them an "Amelia Bedelia" book.  Any one will do since she always is misunderstanding multiple meaning words.  For this lesson, I read Good Driving, Amelia Bedelia

After reading we talked about how she mixes up words I gave each student a phrase with a word that has multiple meanings.  The students got their iPads and opened Educreations.

(I had previously saved a template in dropbox and then saved it to the camera roll of each iPad so they didn't have to write the word, but they could easily write or type them)

Once in Educreations they retrieved the template from the camera roll and typed the phrase that I had given them and drew a picture to go with what Mr. Rogers meant and what Amelia Bedelia thought he meant.

Then they went off to a quite place in the library to record their explanation.

Here are a few of their finished products.

TRIP

RING

JAM

FORK

Technology Tuesday: The Million Dollar Project

This is a project that my own 5th grader has to do and (un)lucky for him, he has a mom who likes to use him as a guinea pig.  For this project, he was given $1,000,000 and had to spend all of it.  They were supposed to find pictures with prices of things, tell why they wanted it and round the cost to the nearest $1,000 and show their subtraction work as they spent their money.  We will turn this in as a paper project, but I thought it would be fun to mess around with a few apps at home.  We started by creating a title page using the Story Me app.

With this app, you can turn pictures from your camera roll into comics with speech bubbles and a really cool cartoon feature.  Here is what we did. 

Then we used Skitch to add a title. 

Then we took screen shots of the actual word documents that he was going to turn in that had the item's picture, price, his reason for purchase and his rounding and put them all together with his subtraction work in Educreations. 

Here is the final product in Educreations.