Posts Tagged ‘blogs’

Celebrating Picture Book Month!

Did you know that November is Picture Book Month? Mrs. Murphy and Mrs. Hebert, our librarians, issued a challenge to the Lower School to read picture books in an effort to beat last year’s goal of 4,370.

For the past several weeks, we’ve been discussing blogging when the students come to the lab. To correlate with blogging and the library’s challenge, I asked the third graders to bring a picture book to the lab. They were to produce a book talk and upload it to their blog.

We started class by taking a picture of their book cover.

0 book cover photo

The next step was to read the book.

6 readingWriting isn’t always a favored part of a third grader’s life but the students did understand that this step is important to organizing thoughts and really makes the recording go much more smoothly.

10 writing book reviewThe next step was to choose an app. I gave the option of Tellagami (free; available on App Store and Google Play) and ChatterPix Kids (free from App Store). Both have a limit of 30 seconds so students needed to be concise in what they said. Both also allow the user to import photos from the camera roll. With Tellagami, the students created an avatar that “spoke” their recorded message. With ChatterPix, a “mouth” line is drawn and that moves to the narration. The students enjoyed creating a mouth on their book cover.Tellagami and chatterpixThe students recorded, made sure they were satisfied with the sound, saved to photos, then emailed the video to me. Once students completed the process, I put them to work helping others.

recording and saving

Finally, the children uploaded their video to the KidBlog app. Next week their first grade buddies will be listening to the book talks and making comments on their buddies’ posts. I also posted all the book talks on TVS TechnoWizards.

Class Blogs:

Below is a visual of the apps we used for the project.

app smashing with book talks

 

 

 

 

Writing for our Blogging Buddies

This year is the first time we have participated in the Primary Blogging Community, a fantastic group blogging opportunity set up by Kristen Wideen. We have 4 teachers involved this year. From second grade we have Mrs. Cooper, Mrs. Garcia, and Mrs. Shapard. Mrs. Weth, one of our third grade teachers, is also participating.

Each teacher is placed in a group of three other classrooms. Our students will be communicating with children from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, other areas of the United States. We are thrilled to learn about life in other parts of the US and the world!

The first month is spent focusing on one classroom each week. The “focus” class blogs as a class and the others leave comments. It’s a wonderful way for teachers to model how to write quality posts and comments with student input. The second month is when the children actually do the posting and commenting themselves. Again, one class is the “focus” group so they write posts while the others share comments.

This week, both Mrs. Shapard (2nd grade) and Mrs. Weth (3rd grade) are the focus classes. The teachers guided their children to write an introductory paragraph then they asked the groups to brainstorm what they would like to share. In Mrs. Shapard’s class, each group shared one or two sentences that were added to the post. Click on the link below to view her students discussing what to share.

Shapard_deciding what to post

Mrs. Weth asked her students to jot down several ideas on a white board. Then they decided on their first choice for sharing. The first group that spoke decided to tell about the school and the co-curricular classes they attend each week. The children added so many details that their ideas became the first post! The other groups will hold onto their thoughts to share in a later post!

Using a white board to brainstorm ideas

Using a white board to brainstorm ideas

Already both classes have received comments and questions from the other schools. All are excited to “meet” their blogging buddies!

Comments Wanted!!

image from Haiku Deck

Mrs. Weth’s third graders have been busy writing in their journals! All kinds of writing!

  • Non-fiction: What animals need to survive
  • The Most Embarrassing Moment!
  • A Bucket List: Things that want to do before reaching age 100! (What a great 100th day of school activity!)
  • and much more!

Before the students came for their regular computer lab time, Mrs. Weth and I were discussing how to share the students’ writing. They write in their journals and share with each other but that’s as far as it’s gone.

The students need a bigger audience! We brainstormed a few ideas such as using some of the storytelling apps (Book Creator, Puppet Pals, Toontastic, etc). However since the students had just written their “bucket list” for the 100th day of school, we decided to do something that would immediately put their work out for everyone to see.

We decided on blogging. The students brought their journals to the lab, logged in to their class blog, and off they went! Most chose to write about what they want to accomplish by the time they are 100 years old but a couple chose something else from their journals.


As you can see below, they are eager for responses and would love to hear from you. They are hoping that they will get questions about what they write so that they can respond.

Thanks so much for taking a look at their writing!

Mrs. Weth’s Class Blog

Blogging, Bookmaking, and More!

It started with a book . .

I like to bring in literature as writing prompts. When the first graders came to the lab a couple weeks ago, I began reading It Could Have Been Worse, by A.H. Benjamin. It’s a wonderful book for making predictions and that’s just what we did!

The story is about a little mouse on his way home. Mouse slips and falls and laments that he is having a terrible day. What he doesn’t realize is that the “terrible” things that happen to him save him from snakes, fish, birds, and more. The humorous illustrations show that it really “could have been much worse!”

I read a different amount of the book to each of our first grade classes; stopping just before another “it could have been worse” part. The students were to predict what they thought might happen next. I then asked them to log onto their blog and add a comment to my post:

We just read part of It Could Have Been Worse, by A.H. Benjamin. Poor Mouse is having a hard day! Write a comment about what you think will happen to the snake and to Mouse. What do you think will be the next “But it could have been worse!” part?

Mrs. Hutchinson’s Blog

Mrs. Kee’s Blog

Mrs. Orehek’s Blog

After submitting their comments, the students used Microsoft’s Paint program to illustrate their prediction.

When the students finished, I then read the rest of the book. We discussed our predictions and how to use clues in the story to help us as we predict what will happen next. The students truly enjoyed the book and blogging about their ideas!

Having introduced the Book Creator app to our teachers, I wanted to take this idea a step further. In all my years of teaching, one of my favorite activities is to make class books with students. It is very exciting to now be able to make e-books where students can add text, images, and voice recording. Book Creator is the perfect app for this and it’s extremely easy to use.

I added the students’ images to the app, copied and pasted their blog comments, and then asked the teachers to supervise recording while I worked with the rest of the class in the computer lab. The process took just a couple of weeks, meeting just once a week in the lab!

Cover of Ms Orehek’s class book

student page

Links to the class books: The Book Creator app only allows you to open the ePub book on an iOS device with the iBooks app (i.e. iPad, iPhone, iTouch); not on a PC. Downloading instructions are below the book links. We hope you enjoy the books!

Mrs. Orehek’s Class Book

Mrs. Hutchinson’s Class Book

Mrs. Kee’s Class Book

Directions to download to your iOS device:

    • You will need the iBooks app installed on your iOS device.
    • Click on the book link above.
    • Tap on the download button.
    • Choose Open in . . . and then choose Open in iBooks
    • The book is now in iBooks.

4th Graders Create a Blog Commenting Video!

A couple of weeks ago, a few of Mr. d’Auteuil’s students finished their computer lab assignments and wanted to know what they could do. I suggested that they form small groups and come up with a video to teach our younger students what makes an effective comment or a strong post on a blog.

A few students absolutely took off with the idea, giving up recess for a week to write and practice their ideas. One group of boys finished today! Jitesh, Bryson, Jake, Luke, and Kishan came up with a few ideas that they thought were important to share with others. It’s under a minute long but that’s okay! This is their first production of what I hope will be many more.

“Can’t Do Without” Resources

Just wanted to let you know about two fabulous resources!

The first is ICT Magic. This is a wiki created by a teacher in England who has obviously spent hours and hours collecting educational resources for use in the classroom.  He has categorized all of the links by subject – common subjects such as math and science and other categories such as games and web tools. This is one of the most comprehensive sites I’ve seen!

  ICTmagic

 The other site that has an abundance of excellent information is the Langwitches blog, written by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano. I was able to attend a workshop presented by Silvia at the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston in July. She is an absolute wealth of information. Plus, she shares everything that she does on her blog in great detail with the goal of guiding other teachers. Click on the image below to reach Silvia’s wiki, which is also filled with numerous resources and tips.