RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

Think about how this video applies to teaching and learning. Christine

Qwiki

Today we tried another new site on our Symbaloo. Its an online encyclopedia called Qwiki. It uses pictures in the form of slides along with text which is read to you. We typed in a place: our home town, a person: Eve Bunting, and a historical event: The Triangle Shirtwaist fire (we are currently reading about the fire in Uprising) to learn how Qwiki works. I thought it was very easy to use and quite kid friendly. So far we have experimented with Visuwords (online dictionary) Wonderopolis, and Qwiki. I like Visuwords but I was a little disappointed with Wonderopolis. Our district blocks most video so I children couldn't see the video for the wonder of the day. Christine

Teaching text features

 I really like this nonfiction picture book about the White House to teach children about text features. I was able to get a class set a few years ago from Scholastic. The book includes a great variety of different text features such as: maps, pictures, captions and cutaways.

a page from the book which shows a map of D.C.

I also used this great site: http://panoramas.dk/US/washington-cherry-trees.html
  to show Washington D.C. on my Smartboard. It shows a panoramic view from a spot along the Potomac river. I had the children compare the panorama to the map above. You can see various monuments which help you to identify the spot it was filmed from.



This is the cutaway of the White House in the book

I printed these great posters from a website, unfortunately, I don't remember the address. I use them while we are reading the book, The Story of the White House to discuss different text features we come across.
Christine






Using Visuwords with fifth grade

See the color coded "key " at the  bottom of the screen

Visuwords is an online dictionary/thesaurus which gives a visual color coded representation of a word and its relationship to other words. http://www.visuwords.com/ We have tried it out in our new computer lab with great success! First we gathered words that had stumped us when reading together. Each child typed the words into Visuwords during lab time. I made up a worksheet they could record their findings on. Much more interesting way of learning about words than the traditional way: look it up in the dictionary.  I put Visuwords on my Symbaloo. (See previous post.)Christine

Symbaloo for students

I have been experimenting with Symbaloo and I love it! Symbaloo is a bookmarking site. What makes it so special is the screen is set up as colorful tiles. You add tiles for all the different websites you are interested in collecting for students. I was originally considering Delicious as my choice for a student bookmarking site for our new computer lab. I like Symbaloo so much better for children. All of the tiles are right in front of them in one place. I love that you can color code all of the Math or Social Studies sites together and then put them in one corner. You can also search for other Symbaloos made by educators. I found some interesting websites that way. Here is the link for my Symbaloo so far (its a work in progress).Christine
http://pg.symbaloo.com/?brandedCode=pg

teach different

A Readathon just for fun

Novelty is so important when working with elementary age students. You need that little hook to pull them in. I decided to have a Readathon during our February school break for my 4th and 5th graders. These bookmark timers seemed like just the hook needed to motivate my students to read during vacation. (Our purpose was to have fun while reading/ not raise money).The PTO purchased class sets from http://www.mark-my-time.com/ I gave every child a bookmark timer and a log to write the name of the book, minutes spent reading, and had the parents sign it daily. We built in a few contests: boys against the girls, teams of three (my girls wrote a proposal about how the groups should be formed). I can FEEL them all reading at home right now! Christine