Better Late Than Never

I apologize in advance for the lateness of this post. I actually wrote it on December 21st as a summary of the projects completed before Winter Break but just now realized I never published it. I hope you will still find the information interesting.

First Grade:
The second science unit of the year for first grade is The Solar System. After learning about the Sun in the classroom, the students visited the lab for an introduction on the planets. I was amazed at how much information the students already knew. We had many interesting conversations about how the planets were alike and different. This lead to a fun creative writing and drawing project where students created their own planet, named it, and described what it looked like.


Second Grade:
Writing poetry is always fun. Each second grade student was given a winter word. Then, using Early Learning Toolkit, he/she wrote an acrostic poem. This was a great opportunity to remind students about resting their thumbs on the space bar and hand placement while keyboarding.


Third Grade:
Third graders completed a multimedia project on literary devices using MediaBlender. A literary device is a writing technique that helps create meaning through language. Essentially, it allows writes to paint mental pictures with their words. Students learned about alliteration, onomatopoeia, hyperbole, personification, simile and metaphor and worked with partners to use these devices in their own writing. I will be publishing these projects and will share the link in a future post.

Fourth Grade:
Fourth graders continue to focus on keyboarding through direction instruction and typing games in Type to Learn 4. The students are finding the lessons more challenging as their goals for accuracy and words per minute have begun to increase.