Presidential Reports

The January project for my 5th grade students is to research a United States President and create a magazine cover using the website bighugelabs.com/flickr. Also, the final project submitted must have a wordle of their researched President’s speech. The following pictures are examples of their work.

Here are some areas that are researched:

Use www.wikipedia.com to find the following information:
President Name__________________
____President of the United States
Political Party__________________
Occupation__________________

Use www.brainyquotes.com to find a quote from the president.

Tip for magazine cover is to have a designated spot for the student’s name.


Use http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches to find the Inaugural Speech



Do you Wordle?

The website wordle.net is great for many creative lessons. Seasonal Wordlists, book reports, creative iron on transfers, seeking repetitive words in a paragraph are just a few of the ideas that can be used with Wordle. Wordle takes words and combines them to make a cloud or art out of the words. The words that are repeated are larger where as the words that are not used as much in the paragraph are smaller.

Tips: Put ~ between words that you want to keep together. This could help make a creative display characters for a book report.
Also, have the student type their name in at least 5 times so it becomes part of the wordle. This is for easier identification on the owner after it has been printed.

EXCEL Graphs in December

Excel Graphs are excellent to use during the month of December! Surveying students favorite Christmas Books, Movies, Reindeers are a cinch!

A survey about train snacks can be done after reading Polar Express by Chris van Allsburg or your favorite reindeer after reading The Night Before Christmas.

I like to discuss as a whole group for 1st-2nd grade students where as my 3rd-4th grade students type in their work and edit the graph.

The Safest Way To Share YouTube videos

Lesson planning is like laundry. It always needs to be done. Also, self-assessment on past lessons needs to be updated and reflected upon. I came across this website http://www.safeshare.tv/ while preparing for 5th Grades digital story telling and podcasting lessons which are lessons that will be started in the late winter early spring.

Did you want to share a youtube video in class but didn’t like the advertisement before or after the video?

I have an example below that you can click and see what this website does!

Example: [Video] Miley Cyrus - Party in the USA - ASL Song

The Polar Express

This lesson can be modified for any lower school class. This PowerPoint comes with bells and whistles! As a whole class we watch and listen to The Polar Express by Chris van Allsburg http://www.storylineonline.net/ which is read by Lou Diamond Phillips and is about 9 minutes long. Each students responds to the book by typing in their “wish” for the world on a PowerPoint Slide and inserting their digital picture in their train car window. Students also are shown/modeled how to change the color of their car window. This lesson can be differentiated by having students change the font, size, and color.

Here is a link for the Powerpoint.
http://www.cobbk12.org/sites/literacy/fetc/ppt/Polar_short.ppt

Second Grade Thanksgiving

I am Thankful for my country.

The student will create a 4 linear slide show with title and end slide.
This lesson takes about two class peroids.

Brainstorm and write the different symbols of our country on board.

Type in a symbol of our country for each slide.

Add clip art for each slide.

Change background, font, font size and color.

Print on the color printer.

The turkey tails were created by first graders using Kid Pix.

Thanksgiving Project

Mouse control and spatial relations are hard for first grade students. They need to have a defined space and a mousepad does the trick! I recalled teachers sharing at a Discovery Conference about how the younger students loved the songs and how excited the students get when they listen and sing along.

This is another lesson that I created using the mouse. First Graders opened up Microsoft Paint and the following link is how I guided the directions for the students to draw a turkey. The students saved the picture as a .jpeg file to a shared folder. http://www.leslietryon.com/seasonal1103/turkeydraw.html

I took pictures of them dancing to the song, their drawings and used photo story to display their pictures.


I liked this lesson a lot! I had so much fun as so did the students. The student work is posted on our school website. They have come back to me in the computer lab and told me they have shared it with siblings and relatives. Click on Thanksgiving Project to view the project

First Grade Excel Graphs

I may repeat this often but I teach students how to use the computer to create student made projects. I only see students once a week from 25-40 minutes depending on there grade level. Also, I don't teach just one class for each grade. I teach in a large school with 4 or 5 classes depending on the grade level.This is my current first grade lesson that was inspired by clicking around discovery streaming.

Day 1
First I opened up Microsoft Excel and typed yes and no on the spreadsheet. I asked each first grade student "Do Kitty's like to get baths?" I used the chart wizard to create a graph showing the results.
Next, we watched the Discovery Streaming movie titled Doggy Gets a Bath (Why Not Kitty, Too?).
After the movie I asked the students again if kitty's like baths and created a new graph.

Day 2
I used the following websites to help guide the instruction on how to practice using the mouse to draw pictures of cats for our bulletin board.
http://www.joysikorski.com/how_to_kitty.html
http://www.great-pictures-of-cats.com/how-to-draw-kittens.html

Day 3
I will use some of my planning time to create a photostory of the pictures and graphs.