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.

The next step was to read the book.

Writing 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.

The 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.The 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.

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:

• Mrs. Gramentine’s Class
• Mrs. Prescott’s Class
• Mrs. Weth’s Class

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