First Grade
As I watched the first graders working on their Little Bird Tales during the last couple of weeks, I noticed that there was quite a bit of "hunting and pecking" going on in the computer lab. They need keyboarding practice! Even though formal keyboarding doesn't begin until 3rd grade at Lovett, I decided to teach the first graders about appropriate posture and finger-placement so they could get a bit of keyboarding head start. Their little fingers have a hard time reaching all the homerow keys (ASDF JKL:), but they gave it their best shot! I had them type short notes to give their parents at the parent-teacher conferences last Thursday and Friday. The letters were supposed to contain one thing that is going well about first grade, one thing they need a little help with, and one thing they absolutely love about first grade at Lovett. We talked about using the return key, the tab key, and proper capitalization. Hopefully the parents who received letters were impressed with their children's work! We will continue to practice our keyboarding skills for the remainder of the year.
We had a special guest visit with some of our first and second graders this week. Mr. Owen Mathews used to be the director of technology for Lovett's middle school, and he is now a technology trainer, author, illustrator, and app developer. He is in the process of creating a picture book app for children and he asked for Lovett students to give their feedback on his app. We had fun checking out all his hard work!
Second Grade
I did not have any second grade classes during last week's rotation, but stay tuned for information about a new online math practice program we are testing out, called Ten Marks!
Third Grade
(Most of) our third graders have begun working in iMovie! We have learned how to storyboard, gather information and images using teacher-selected research websites, create music using Garageband, edit images using Preview, Pages, and/or Doozla, and we are now ready to start building our movies. We made it! For our first lesson in iMovie this week, we talked about dragging images from our Dropbox folders into the iMovie storyboard and changing the effects settings--the Ken Burns zooming effect, cropping and rotating images, shortening or lengthening the amount of time an image was in view, adding video effects (like an x-ray filter), and adding text and titles. I was impressed with how well the children did navigating a challenging application, but I think they found the interface to be very similar to GarageBand. I can't wait to have more time to spend with my moviemakers!