The Last Great Race - The Iditarod

Students in 3rd grade are preparing to follow the Iditarod Sled Dog Race that begins on March 6th. The last two weeks, students have been learning about Alaska and the race by labeling a class map and participating in an Internet scavenger hunt. Each class will choose a musher to track and follow along in their classroom. In addition, the students will be participating in a race of their own, the Idita-Read. Students will mush from Anchorage to Nome virtually as they read 1,112 minutes to match the 1,112 miles of the actual race route. Children will visit the website http://www.idita-read.org/ to log their minutes each day. They will also have the opportunity to write book reviews to share with students around the United States.

2nd Grade Monsters Are Back!!!

One of my favorite computer lab projects is the Monster Project. Using monsters as a vehicle, students create monsters on the computer using the drawing program Early Learning Toolkit. Next, they write descriptive paragraphs in Microsoft Word describing their monsters. Many adjective-related activities both in the lab and classroom help the students think about powerful descriptions. Finally, our students exchange written descriptions with students from another school. There are more than 50 classrooms across the US and Canada participating in this year's project. Our partner schools are in Canada, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Illinois.

The second graders have drawn their monsters and began typing their descriptions today. Next week, each rough draft will have a new pair of eyes as they participate in the process of peer editing. Once suggestions are made and the drafts are edited, final copies will be uploaded to the project wiki.

Check out the wiki, http://monsterproject.wikispaces.com/Welcome, to learn more.

Third Graders Explore Scratch

Scratch is a programming language that teaches important mathematical and computational skills. The program also encourages students to think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively by creating interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art. All of these projects can then be shared on the Web. Oh, and did I mention it is lots of fun too!

Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab with support from the National Science Foundation. It is a free download. You can download Scratch from http://scratch.mit.edu/download. The support area on the website has a Getting Started Guide along with answers to frequently asked questions and video tutorials.

Third grade students spent several class periods learning Scratch basics and exploring the program. Many students have already downloaded the program and started projects at home.

Fourth Grade Haz Jazz!

Fourth graders enjoyed presenting their Jazz multimedia projects to family and friends on Friday after their We Haz Jazz show. Using a rubric to guide their work, students created projects in MediaBlender combining text, music, and video. Projects were graded on content as well as design. Minimum requirements included a title page, timeline page, career page and resources page although every group added additional pages to their stacks. It was wonderful to see students working cooperatively and creatively. Projects will be posted online in the following weeks.

First Steps of Internet Research - 1st Grade

Even though it happened more than 40 years ago, first grade students were fascinated to watch Neil Armstrong take his first step on the moon and claim, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Furthering their study on the solar system, students visited the lab to participate in an Internet scavenger hunt. After reviewing how to launch Firefox and vocabulary such as scroll bar, back button, home button and hyperlink, students visited this website to answer questions about the Sun, Moon, planets, asteroids, stars, constellations and asterisms.

Photo URL: http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/kids/sites/lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov.kids/files/footprint.jpg

The Write Stuff - 3rd Grade Literary Devices

As I mentioned in the previous post, students in third grade spent three weeks studying and using different literary devices in their writing. Working cooperatively, each pair of students created a six-page multimedia presentation. In addition to learning ways to make their writing more interesting and descriptive, they practiced a multitude of skills: using drawing tools, inserting and resizing graphics, navigating folders and creating interactive buttons. I was so impressed by the teamwork and cooperation shown by all the groups. Here is the link to the final projects.

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.