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.