Mrs. Anton's Class!

December 8, 2013 · 9:13 pm

Christmas Card Fun!

We made Christmas cards this week for a special project that we are taking part in this year! It is called by Holiday Card Exchange Project which matches us with 29 other schools across the continent of North America. It is part of a variety of projects coordinated by Jennifer Wagner’s Projects by Jen. We are sending cards to a variety of places in the United States as well as one other school in Canada in Ontario. Our cards are going all over the United States. We send one card to each of the schools on our list and they send us a card back! We will be mapping out where our cards originate. A fun way to learn more about the world. I will try to find pictures about each of the places our cards come from! The theme of the cards was supposed to be Mittens, Caps, and Scarfs. We focused on the mittens.

We had to write about one interesting fact about our school and some of the details about our class! The children brainstormed some ideas and then chose their favorites to include in the card. We had to include some details about our school and classroom as well as the average temperature in Nanaimo on December 15th.

I found a special punch that lets us punch out snowflakes to add to our cards. It was a huge hit!

I mailed the cards on Friday and hopefully we will be receiving some cards soon!

We had a great time making these snowman ornaments with our buddies! We hope you like them! We had fun making them!

They all have such personality!

We have also been having fun learning about the special ways we celebrate Christmas. Over the next few weeks, the children will be taking turns bringing home our Christmas homework! We have four Christmas bags containing some “homework” for you to do about how your family celebrates the holidays. One part of the homework is sharing something special you do at your house to celebrate Christmas.

To start the bags off I had the first share! As my parents were Dutch, we celebrated Sinterclass. I brought my wooden shoes to school and shared how Sinterclass filled my shoes when I was a little girl. We learned some phrases in Dutch and I taught the children how to count to 10 in Dutch. We put my wooden shoes out the door and Sinterclass came!

We really enjoyed the first four Christmas bag shares! The children really enjoy trying to guess what is in the bag!

Can’t wait to see the next group!

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Tagged as Christmas Card Project, Sinterclass, snowman ornament

November 18, 2013 · 10:00 pm

Too Much Fun with Dinosaurs!

Dinosaurs have been crawling all around our classroom!

Can you see the dinosaur crawling on her pants? That’s the first time I have ever heard “Mrs. Anton! There’s a dinosaur crawling up my leg!”

We have been working with the Adventure mode on the Walking with the Dinosaurs app. You download a printable target and print it off in colour. Then you point the iPad at the screen and suddenly there are dinosaurs crawling all around!

You can feed them and they come running! I wish I could record the student’s faces! Too much fun for me!

We are going to write about the dinosaur pictures we took last week.

I am hoping to get the stories posted to their personal blogs!

Watch for them!

Today we did another science experiment too! Science is magic!

You pour water out of the pitcher and it “sticks” on the string to the cup! Everyone got a turn to pour the water and catch the water! That’s why everyone got a piece of string in their planner. You get to try it too!

I used a little pitcher that I had from a child’s set of dishes. You could use a creamer… Make sure you do this over a sink or have lots of paper towels handy!

Don’t get too wet!

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Filed under Augmented Reality, Dinosaurs, iPads, Science Experiments, Walking with Dinosaurs

Tagged as Augmented Reality, ipads, Walking with Dinosaurs

November 14, 2013 · 10:12 pm

Big Dinosaur AR Fun!

We had some fun today with a new iPad app I found called Walking with Dinosaurs! It is another Augmented Reality app that is amazing! We played with the Photo Booth aspect today. The app allows you to pick from a variety of dinosaurs, orient them on a screen and then take pictures with the dinosaur! We had some fun by posing and acting out a variety of situations.

We held them in our hands!

And we gave them a pet!

We even pretended we were a little bit scared!

And super brave!

We are planning to write stories to go with our pictures!

We took pictures of everyone with the dinosaurs. Watch for them over the next few days! It looks like our class has been invaded by prehistoric dinosaurs!

You can also choose the Adventure Mode. It uses augmented reality and suddenly you have dinosaurs walking around. You can even feed them and they come running over to eat! Very cool! So far, I have only downloaded the free app but I think this one deserves an upgrade!

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Tagged as Augmented Reality, dinosaurs, ipads, Walking with Dinosaurs

November 8, 2013 · 8:58 pm

Dinosaurs AR Style!

This week we have started a new theme about dinosaurs! Today, we had fun with some more Augmented Reality cards for some of the more popular dinosaurs.

Mr. Brick even got to try it out. These cards came as part of the package I downloaded from the AR Flashcards app. You print off the cards with a color printer. These particular cards came with the AR flashcards for the alphabet that we blogged about a few weeks ago! Once you have the cards all you have to do is activate the app and then hold the iPad over the picture. Magic happens! A 3 D image of the dinosaur appears!

If you tap the screen, a child’s voice says the name of the dinosaur. I thought you had to hold it over only one card at at time but the children discovered that they could get all the dinosaurs at once by putting the cards closer together!

It is really cool!

We also did our first research report. I compiled a small set of dinosaur facts about apatosaurus. We read the facts together and then we sorted the facts into four different categories. Our categories were What They Look Like, What They Eat, About the Babies, and Cool Facts. There were a lot of cool facts!

You can find them in the hallway! Take a look!

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Tagged as Augmented Reality, dinosaur bulletin board, ipads

November 4, 2013 · 10:45 pm

Adding up the Fun!

We have had lots of fun learning last week!

We started off with our buddies working on our Five Little Pumpkin books!

Our buddies helped us make the fancy pop up covers! Then they helped us read the book!

We also made a Five Little Pumpkins snack with them! That’s the same as ants on a log but we used carrot rounds to pretend they were pumpkins instead!

We had an absolutely great day on our field trip to Brannen Lake for our hayride. We couldn’t have asked for better weather. Thank you to everyone who was able to help us!

More about that trip later this week! Watch for it!

We had a great day on Halloween! We had fun making a variety of crafts in the morning!

We made five little pumpkin puppets!

We made some mummy cans. We learned how to make them do a special trick to make them sound like Dracula. I hope everyone remembered their promise! They promised to stop making their cans make the funny noise when they Moms told them too! Hope you are all still talking to me!

We had a wonderful afternoon on Thursday doing centers with the other Grade One and Kindergarten students. Thank you to everyone that came to help!

We had a great time looking at all the doors in the annual Halloween Door decorating contest! This is our door!

We also make this funky Halloween quilt using squares and triangles!

We ended up our week working on addition stories.

And we worked some more with the Augmented Reality apps!

It all added up to a lot of learning fun!

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Filed under Augmented Reality, Buddies, Halloween, iPads

Tagged as Adding practise, Doodle Buddy projects, Halloween, ipads, scarecrow cooking activity

October 28, 2013 · 8:10 pm

Fun with Ghosts!

We have been having a bit of fun with ghosts! We have a little ghost named Gus who likes to write to us in the morning! He is very good at hiding Mrs. Anton’s stapler and playing tricks on her! We like to read stories about ghosts for him. Recently we read a story about a little white ghost who changes colour depending on the food he has eaten!

After we read the story, we brainstormed a list of foods that would turn the ghost different colors! Then the children made their own stories and illustrated them!

The children have been having a great time reading each other’s books!

We also made the pictures with the iPads. I took a picture of the ghost using the iPad camera and we used that as a new background in Doodle Buddy! The children then used the stamps to choose the object that turns the ghost a new colour. Then they used the glitter pen to fill in the ghost to his new colour!

I had to try it too!

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Tagged as Doodle Buddy projects, ghosts, ipads

October 21, 2013 · 8:02 pm

Augmented Reality Fun! Too Cool!

Today we experimented with an amazing new app on the iPads. The app is called AR Flash Cards. AR is short for Augmented Reality. It is a fantastic app! I printed off the Alphabet cards on my color printer at home. Then I cut them apart. I had already downloaded the app. You basically open the app, place the ipad over the card and wait a little bit. Magic happens!!

A three dimensional animation of the animal on the alphabet card appears on the screen. When you touch the screen the audio component can be heard. It tells the child the name of the letter and the animal!

I was able to let all the children see the magic at the same time using the projector and the special adapter cord I have for the iPad. Later, the children used the iPads independently to try it out by themselves.

I wish I could have taped the looks on their faces when the first animation appeared!

The alphabet cards are really neat and I know we will get a lot of use out of them! They were free! Very easy way to get students interested in alphabet skills! We will be having lots of fun with alphabetizing, letter sounds, spelling practice, and so on with this app!

There are more cards coming soon but they have a cost attached. The dinosaur ones could be really cool!

We also worked with another augmented reality app I have discovered. It is called CoLAR Mix.

I was a bit sneaky! I had the children color a special coloring page that I had downloaded for them. I told them if they did a really good job we would do something really cool with it!

After they finished coloring, I loaded this app and just held the iPad over their coloring.

The pumpkins on their coloring pages come to life and start dancing around the page. They roll around and pop up on top of each other! Very cool! Of course, everyone wants to have a turn!

So far, I have only been able to download the free pages.

You can see the original coloring page on this screen. The animations are really fun!

We are definitely having Too Much Fun!

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Tagged as Alphabet, AR Flash Cards, Augmented Reality, CoLAR, ipads, Pumpkins

October 20, 2013 · 6:42 pm

Scarecrow Day Fun!

Friday was Scarecrow Day! I loved all the costumes! Thank you so much for participating! We had some amazing scarecrows! I took pictures of the whole class and individual pictures of everyone! Good memories!

We tried to figure out how many scarecrows we had in the classroom. I like scarecrows and I have quite a collection! We actually didn’t finish counting them all as we got distracted when we realized that we had even more scarecrows because we were all dressed up as scarecrows. I hope to do the search for my scarecrows next week instead!

We read one of my favourite stories by Margaret Wise Brown called The Scarecrow Boy. In the story the little boy scarecrow wants to be a real scarecrow like his Dad. One day he decides to run away and try to scare the crows in the cornfield all by himself. He makes six different faces at the crow to try to scare it away! As we read the story the children showed me their six scariest faces too! Pretty scary!

Then they made their own scarecrow faces to go with the story. Take a look!

We also make these delicious scarecrow faces. Most of the students liked all or at least part of the dish! Delicious!

We also made scarecrow books with our buddies. They helped us cut and color them and put them together. The big buddies helped the little buddies practice reading them, too!

I introduced an new app on the iPads to the children that focuses on learning the beginning sight words we are currently learning. It is called Word Bingo.