Internet Safety

These cartoons and real life students presents 5 e-safety SMART rules on how to make online decisions.  It discusses cyber bullying, not sharing personal information, viruses and stresses to tell an adult when something is uncomfortable to the user online.  It is broken down in 5 chapters or you can watch the whole movie at one time.

http://www.childnet.com/resources/the-adventures-of-kara-winston-and-the-smart-crew

My 4^th grade students work in pairs to create power point slides to present to their peers about the importance of Internet safety to reinforce the concepts presented in the cartoon. After they slides were completed the students used animation to have their boxes come into the slide. 

Another lesson extension: I modeled the importance of protecting personal information using search engines like Google and websites like Whitepages.com are great resources to reinforce the importance of not sharing personal information with online strangers.

 

 

Another New School Year, Another Computer Lab Upgrade

Welcome to another school year.  I am returning again to the computer lab and It is hard to believe that 5 years ago I started this blog.  I have learned a few things along the way and I have to say staying current in a continually evolving field brings challenges!  One rule of thumb when the computers are updated in the classroom is probably a good time to review the curriculum. After reexamining our curriculum I realized I needed to incorporate more research projects.  In fact, I am incorporating a lot of new lessons this year!

One new research I incorporated is this research lesson on spiders for the Second graders.  I had them complete a questionnaire that used www.enchantedlearning.com  to research some basic facts about spider.  Next, we went to the internet and copy and saved pictures of spiders to be used for our drawings.  The students used PowerPoint to insert their picture and type three facts about spiders (spiders can/are/have). I did put the headings Can, Are and Have on the board and called on students to generate a word list to help them with their sentences. We finished it up with designing a background and talked about fall colors, the students added animation and transitions.    This was a GREAT project to start off for the fall season! 

Summer T-shirt

This is a wonderful review to do with 2nd grade students.  First, I review how to insert clip art and word art.  The directions are to share their summer plans, or what they did last summer.  If students aren't sure what to put on the shirt I encourage them to either design a t-shirt or make a t-shirt with their favorites.  I ask them to save it independently (directions are written on the board for help) and print (the students need to change the printer to a colored printer).  They could all be hung up on a bulletin board with clothes pins! A neat idea I saw on Pinterest is to hot glue a thumbtack to a clothes pin! 

Inserting Text Boxes

Inserting text boxes can be a quick lesson when short on time. I did this lesson with my 2nd graders. They asked if we could do it again for a different season, i.e. label the Easter Bunny! My classroom is near the Spanish room so I can see this lesson extending because the students create their own vocabulary study guides.

Snow Day!

      I am a kid at heart.  Just like the students I long for the unplanned day off  commonly none as the "Snow Day." I saw on another website where the teacher had the students disguise their digital picture with a snow outfit.  I did this lesson with my 4th graders and the loved using Paint to draw over their picture! 
     4th graders spend a lot of time writing paragraphs.  We added an expository paragraph explaining the different activities that can occur on a snow day.  This makes a GREAT bulletin board!

National Pizza Month

Welcome Back to a New School Year!

This is an update on a previous entry of National Pizza Month. I used Google Documents to survey third graders favorite pizza topping.  We then typed the information into an Excel spread sheet to create a pie graph! The students used pizza items to change the portion of the pie graph accordingly. 

This year my first grade students helped out with the celebration and designed their own pizza.  The first graders used the following link

http://www.abcya.com/pizza.htm to create their own pizza. 

Perfect for a bulletin board!

Creative Writing

      I took this picture at the end of last summer of my golden retriever staring out the window. He sat their long enough for me to frame him in the picture. The school year is coming to a close, short on lessons and only a few more days of school left, I still need to teach but the project based learning lessons have to be less time consuming. We discussed the different aspects of the picture. When was it taken? Where is it taken? Who was the photographer...etc. Leading to the big question “What is he looking at?” We didn't discuss the question "What he is looking at?" since the creativity would be directed in the paragraph.   It made a great writing bulletin board for grades K-5 creatively expressing on what he was watching or looking at! (I have no idea what he was looking at so intently for such a long time)

The following are just a few of my favorite titles:

What Are You Doing Bob?


Bob, the Amazing Starrer


The Interesting Bob


What’s Wrong Bob?


Bob, WHAT is it?


Bob, the Looking Detective


Bob, the Staring Dog Of Memphis


Bob is Sight Seeing!