We have been having some fun recently using the handheld devices that came with our Promethean board.
We have a device for each child to use. These handhelds are part of the Promethean board that we received as part of the Mind Share Learning Video Challenge package we won in 2014. The ActivInspire software lets the students respond to questions individually using the handhelds.
They respond to the questions by typing in their response and then I can collate their results and share them!
You can see for this question we got 100%!
One of our students really got into it!
The students love this way of responding and were awesome about helping each other!
We have been having a lot of fun creating our own digital books! The children have been using a combination of different apps to create their own version of Read to Me stories! The children pick their favourite books and then use the camera on the iPads to take pictures of each page.
Then they import each picture of each page into the Explain Everything app.
When they have imported all the pages they go to a quiet place and record themselves reading the story! We wanted to make it like a “read to me” book where each word is highlighted as it is read so we used the pointer option in Explain Everything. There are a lot of different pointer options in this app. You can use an arrow, a hand, and the very special light sabre! You can guess which pointer is the most popular!
I love that you can listen to each child reading and how it encourages their reading growth! They can hear themselves and they want to make their reading come alive for the listener. They often will redo pages if they don’t like how they sound! How cool is that!
When the book is complete we save the book to the camera roll. When the project is saved to the camera roll in Explain Everything it becomes a video. Then you can open it and listen to the student reading the story as they point to each phrase or word in the story! It is amazing! The best part is that they can share their reading with everyone! During Eat and Read time I open up the SeeSaw app and we watch and listen to the children in the class read us stories on our big Promethean board! The children love listening to their classmates read their stories. It doesn’t get any better than that!
We have been using the SeeSaw app to share our work on the iPads this year!
This is an amazing product that lets us share the work that each child does in a digital format. Each child saves their work to their own folder which can be accessed at school using a class QR code.
The children can access their own work at home using their own personalized QR code.
The children are able to create projects and then share them using the QR codes to access the site and then upload their projects from the camera roll! Way to much fun!
We also read our books to our favourite stuffies without any technology! Both ways are awesome! Had to take this picture as it was way too cute!
We have been having a lot of fun using the handheld devices that came with our Promethean Board.
We won the devices and the Promethean board last year in the annual MindShare Learning Digital Video Challenge contest. I wish the sponsors of the contest could come and see how much we love using our board and the handhelds.
We are a very lucky classroom!
We have had a lot of fun practicing our math and reading skills using the devices and some games that I managed to download for us.
The devices look a bit like little cell phones and the children are absolutely fearless about using them!
I love it when they cheer when everyone gets the answer!
We have had a great time taking part in the Holiday Card Exchange this year! I signed our class up to take part in a Global Christmas Card exchange this year! This card exchange is coordinated by Jennifer Wagner. Over 1000 teachers worldwide took part this year! We were responsible for sending out 32 cards to different schools in the world. Each of the schools in our group was responsible for sending us a card back! The theme for the cards this year was Lights. We sent off our cards in the early part of December and started receiving cards during the last week of school before the holiday break. We received the rest of the cards after Christmas.
We sent cards to faraway places like New Zealand, Japan, and Kenya! We sent cards to other parts of Canada such as Newfoundland and Ontario. We sent many cards to schools all over the United States. And we got some wonderful cards back. Some of the cards had pictures of the classes, or letters from the student who made the card.
I bought a map of the world and we displayed our mail and where it came from! You can see our mail on the display board outside of the gym. We also used Google Maps on our Promethean Board to figure out where each of our cards came from and how far away the school was from us! Using the Promethean board was awesome because I could zero in on a location of a swipe of my fingers. Very cool.
As part of the project we had to include an information page about our school. We had to include what the average temperature would be in December, how many boys and girls were in our classes, and what we liked about our school. We found out some very interesting things. The fact that the children were most interested in was how many boys or girls were in the classes!
This picture show some of our mail on one day! Very exciting to get mail just for us! The stamps were very pretty too!
This is a closeup of the letter from Nairobi, Kenya. We learned a lot from this letter.
We learned a lot about different schools around the world and how big the world is! We also learned how much fun it is to get mail! I think we are all a little sad that this project is done. We liked getting Christmas cards!
We had a great time on our Polar Express Day! The day started off with a special visit from Santa!
We had a great visit together! He wanted to hear the song we did for the Christmas concert!
We gave him one of our guitars and we sang the North Pole Rock and Roll song together! Lots of fun!
The other Grade One class joined us aboard the Polar Express with some very special Polar Express tickets! We had a great time together. We had hot chocolate with mini marshmallows and lots of amazing treats just like on the Polar Express. Thank you to all the parents who helped supply all the goodies this time! The two groups gathered on the carpet to watch the movie The Polar Express in the afternoon. It was a real treat to see it on our new Promethean board!
Here is a picture of the very important mail we received from the North Pole! Our buddies helped us write letters to Santa and our replies came to the school! Very exciting!
We have continued to learn about coding with the Hour of Code designed for this year! This is a great set of lessons about coding with Elsa from the Frozen movie. The students learned how to make Elsa make a snowflake design on the ice using coding. By putting a set of commands using Blockly the students made Elsa move on the ice.
We are so lucky because we can show this on our wonderful Promethean board so that everyone can see it clearly. The best part is that the students can come up to the board and move the pieces around themselves. You can bet that I have a lot of volunteers for that job!
We have also returned to the computer lab and worked on the Angry Birds Hour of Code and had a lot of fun trying to complete the Hour of Code by ourselves with just a little help from some wonderful students in our Grade Seven class who helped the students log on. It was really neat to see everyone helping each other out whenever someone got stumped!
It was really neat to see other classes in our school also try the Hour of Code. I think we had five classes at our school take part!
We have been having fun making sentences! The children love making sentences on the Promethean Board.
Thank you to everyone who sent me their sentences using the word banks that were sent home! The pictures are awesome and the sentences are fantastic!
Here are just a few samples! I have a lot more and will post them over the next little while!
This is a neat idea from Evan’s family that I have to share! They made flashcards of all the Pre-Primer Dolch words and put them on his bedroom ceiling. Then Evan used his flashlight to find words to read! Too much fun! I think I will try it with our next word list in the classroom!
We have been working with a variety of word recognition apps in the classroom. One of my favorites is Montesorri Words. T
The children have to spell the word to match the picture by dragging the appropriate letters to fill the boxes. It has several levels of difficulty ranging from simple three and four letter words to more complicated crossword puzzles. The children really like it because it rewards each correct answer with a fun page that lets them move a variety of images around the screen.
The other word recognition app we have been using a lot is Word Bingo.
This is a great little app that lets the children practice the Dolch word lists. There is a bingo component and a spelling component.
You can also find this game on the ABC Ya! site. We have a link to the game on our classroom WIKI!
We have been working on learning to print our numbers and letters correctly. Guess what! There is an app for that! My favorite one is called Letter School. This is a very popular app. The animations are amazing. My favorite one is the lawnmower!
It is fun to listen to the children giggle at the animations. It is really fun when I attach the iPad to our Promethean board! They love the one with the fuse! It looks like it blows up and shakes the whole screen. Learning how to print can be lots of fun!
We had a great time on Scarecrow Day! We read an awesome story by Margaret Wise Brown called The Little Scarecrow Boy. This story is about a little boy who wants to scare crows just like his Dad. He learns to make very scary scarecrow faces and goes out to try to scare away some crows. We made our own version of the story. The children made six different pictures of scary scarecrow faces that they were able to slide through the scarecrow face and retell the story. I was so proud of these guys who sat down together to share their books with each other. They did a great job reading their books!
There were a lot of scary scarecrow faces. They worked very hard on their books!
We also learned about a new app on the iPad called Doodle Buddy. This is a really superb app that we will be using a great deal! The children experimented with the drawing tools to make scarecrows. I demonstrated the app using our new Promethean Board. I can attach the iPad to the board with a special cable and the screen is projected on the board. It was cute because the children didn’t initially understand that I was drawing the picture on the iPad and they thought that the board was drawing the picture! Eventually they caught on and then I had the students take over the demonstration!
We also did some scarecrow cooking. We made scarecrow faces and ate them up. The children decorated a rice cake using cream cheese as the “glue” to put the features on the rice cake. They used red pepper for the smile, a carrot for the nose, celery for the eyebrows, banana slices and craisins for the eyes, and alfalfa sprouts for the hair. Most of the children enjoyed this yummy treat or at least some parts of it! Many thanks to Carter B.’s mom for helping to supervise this activity!
We also made another scarecrow book, made some scarecrow art, and learned to do the scarecrow dance! (the chicken dance) It was fun to dress up for the day! We took lots of pictures to share with you! Lots of fun and lots of learning too!
We have been having a lot of fun learning to use our new Promethean Board and learning to read at the same time! I have been learning how to use the board. While learning about the board and all the neat things we are going to be able to do with it, I found this really neat set of pages called Cut Up Sentences that lets the children move words around the screen to make up sentences.
We have been having a lot of fun with this one and the children really like coming up to the board and moving the tiles into the correct order!
I made a set for the children to use on their own. They have been having a lot of fun creating sentences with their own word tiles and then sharing them with each other.
We have also used the Promethean Board to do our addition stories together. I was able to create a copy of the assignment we were working on the board and then we filled in the equations together! The students created the math stories on their work spaces using our skeleton and spider manipulatives and then we recorded the corresponding equations.
The children were very keen to have a turn writing the addition sentence on the big screen!
We have an exciting new addition to our classroom! Our Promethean board has been installed and is up and running! Soooo exciting!
A lot of people helped get it operational and we would like to thank them for all their hard work!
We would especially like to thank the people from Promethean who sponsored this wonderful prize! The board was one of the prizes in the Mindshare Learning Digital Video Learning Challenge contest that we won in the spring! It is an amazing prize and WE LOVE IT! It is going to be very well used!
Mrs. Anton's Class! 