First Grade
We've been having fun in first grade computer! For our most recent activity, we read the book The Great Fuzz Frenzy by Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel because the Stevens sisters actually came to Lovett this week! After sharing the book aloud, one of our first grade classes recreated its favorite part of the book and two first grade classes recorded brief video clips sharing with the author and illustrator what they enjoyed the most. Have a look!
This week we began a new project using the program Pages. Pages is an application to which many students have access at home, and we definitely use it a lot at school in the upper elementary grades, so I wanted to introduce it and generate interest in it with some of our youngest learners. The first graders are learning about adjectives as part of their poetry study, so I wanted to extend that learning into the computer lab; I did so by incorporating the use of Pages. The children have each selected an image using our safe search "Image Quest," saved their image to the Desktop of their computer, and then dragged their image into Pages to begin annotating the images with strong adjectives. Examples to follow!
P.S. Image Quest is a great image-searching tool to use at home. Please email me for the username and password needed when accessing the site off campus.
P.S. Image Quest is a great image-searching tool to use at home. Please email me for the username and password needed when accessing the site off campus.
Second Grade
Speaking of Pages, we are ankle deep in a Pages-based project with second grade as well. The second graders are involved in a social studies-related inquiry project centered on the state of Georgia, so I wanted them to be familiar with using a template in Pages in the event that their teachers wanted them to use Pages to showcase what they learned about the many wonderful features of Georgia. We have been using newsletter templates to create "All About Me" projects in order to gain experience with creating text boxes, filling placeholders, modifying text, manipulating objects, etc. in Pages. Hopefully this experimentation time will lead to greater success if and when the second grade teachers begin using Pages with their children. Here are some examples of newsletter templates in Pages.
Third Grade
Boy, we have been busy in third grade computer class lately! Our iMovie projects are almost finished, and in fact, with one class this week we began brainstorming how our showcase event might go! We have worked on editing images, exporting GarageBand files as iTunes files to then add to the movies, adding transitions between movie clips, create voiceovers, add video of ourselves, add text to images, adjust the volume of different movie elements so our voices can be heard over our music, etc. We are now putting the finishing touches on our movies, and we are each responsible for asking four other classmates to view our video before we say, "I'm done!" Next week we will review exporting our projects!