First Grade
I am so excited to be starting an new project with my first graders in the new year! We will be using a website called Little Bird Tales to do some online storytelling, similar to what our second graders are doing with Storybird. In Mrs. Darsey's class, the children are each making their own book about a topic of their choice. Mrs. Raymer's class is writing a collective piece sharing what they have learned about China, Mrs. Ralls' class is also writing a joint book on China, and Ms. Murphy's class is writing a collective piece about Christmas traditions in Germany and Sweden. The children are using Doozla to create their book illustrations, and then I am uploading their work into Little Bird Tales so the children can add text and their voices as narration. Here is an example of one child's finished book:
Second Grade
The second graders are in the middle of a geography and map skills study, so we put our Storybird books on pause for this week so the children could work on created maps on the computers. These were no ordinary maps, however. These maps detailed unique country creations, complete with geographical features like mountains, rivers, volcanos, creeks, cities, etc. It looks like it will take us more than one class period to complete this activity, but we're having fun!
Third Grade
Deep breath...
We are launching into an iMOVIE project in third grade! I have never used iMovie with students of this age before (I didn't even use iMovie with my fourth graders!), so I am slightly apprehensive about how this project might go, but I am mostly excited about how much my third graders will learn and how much fun they will have by engaging in the movie-making process. I really wanted to begin 2013 with a project that the children would be excited about and challenged by, and I know how much they enjoy being "movie stars," so this seemed like a viable option.
For our first lesson for this project, I shared this sample student movie from BrainPOP with the children to give them an idea of what I have in mind for them. We talked about the steps involved in making a movie using this anchor chart:
We are launching into an iMOVIE project in third grade! I have never used iMovie with students of this age before (I didn't even use iMovie with my fourth graders!), so I am slightly apprehensive about how this project might go, but I am mostly excited about how much my third graders will learn and how much fun they will have by engaging in the movie-making process. I really wanted to begin 2013 with a project that the children would be excited about and challenged by, and I know how much they enjoy being "movie stars," so this seemed like a viable option.
For our first lesson for this project, I shared this sample student movie from BrainPOP with the children to give them an idea of what I have in mind for them. We talked about the steps involved in making a movie using this anchor chart:
I suggested that the children choose a topic for their movies that they are interested in or that they know a lot about (just like they do as writers). After talking through the gist of the project, we used the remainder of the class period to work on our storyboards because you know, moviemakers must create rough drafts just as writers do! Here is a copy of the storyboard if you're interested in using it and the sample storyboard that I used with the children.
A couple of points worth emphasizing:
WISH US (me) LUCK!
- This project will be completed entirely at school across several class periods.
- This is an individual project. The children will use the cameras built into the Desktop computers in the lab.
- Minimal props will be used. We will rely heavily on using our strong search skills to located images that are perfect for our movies versus bringing in miscellaneous items that will appear on camera with us.
- Bringing in printed photos to have them scanned and saved to individual computers is acceptable as long as the student has parent permission to do so.
WISH US (me) LUCK!