#TCRWP- This is How We Publish Writing in First Grade

We are finding many new ways to incorporate our technology in a meaningful way to help us learn and master the standards!

This week 1st graders used the iMovie App on the iPad to record their First Quarter Writing. This is their "best, polished writing". We will continue to publish writing every quarter to show our growth throughout this year as writers.

Check out Ellie's Narrative below. Students were to work on a "Small Moment" story, with a beginning, middle and end.

We were able to incorporate several standards (Common Core and ISTE) through the publishing process. 

Publishing writing in 1st grade...Oh the Smiles that Form!

Photo Credit 

Our first graders are so excited to publish their first piece of narrative writing as we near the end of the 1st quarter of school (crazy, I know!) We used iMovie (Movie>Simple) on the iPad to create a movie of their story across pages with pictures of their writing and voice recording for each page. We then finished the movies and uploaded them to the teacher YouTube page (set as unlisted so teachers can determine who sees the movies). You should have seen the sparkle in the 1st graders' eyes as we tapped "share," they were gleaming with pride. Teacher will be sharing these videos in a youtube playlist with parents via their teacher twitter and/or their classroom Blog! Can't wait to share some very soon! 

More on Coding...The language our kids need to learn!

Another awesome resource for teaching our kids how to code. Check our this article found by Sean McGuan. This is the future! Our students need to be ready and add this skill to their repertoire! 

Photo Credit Click on the image above to go to the website 

Click on the image above to go to the article 

Coding In the Classroom...It's That Easy!

How to start Hour of Code in your classroom? Click Here to Find Out from Code.org

Click Here for Student Resources 

Shapes are Everywhere!

Citation

Today I worked with Kindergarten to find shaped in our environment! You would be amazed by how many shapes they found by just walking down the hall! We used iPads and took pictures in Google Drive so that teachers would be able to get back to the pictures later! If you do not know about using Google Drive to take pictures, you're missing out! You can use it on any mobile device (iPad, iPhone, Android phone).

First you need to download the Google Drive App on your device. Then sign in using your Google Apps log-in (Here in Lakewood, we have a Google Apps Edu Domain for our staff and teachers). Once signed in, we created a folder for the pictures entitled "Shape Walk Pictures" and then clicked on the folder to open it.

The great think about Google Drive is that you can take pictures right in Google Drive and you never have to worry about uploading again! You simply click on the + in the top right hand corner and then click "Use Camera" and take away! See below for directions!

Check out some of the awesome shapes we found around us! 

A square, within a square, within a square.

Squares are used to form the window in the door. 

The door knob is a circle

Visualizing Math with the iPad & Grade K

Last week I began working with Kindergarten to visualize mathematics skills using the iPad. Forget the mess of clunky pieces, longs, and flats! Number Pieces App (click here for the App Store) (Also avaliable as a website here) is a great resource, especially for kindergarten learning to write and show numbers 1-10! Students practiced writing their numbers (with the fancy little rhymes of Mrs. Dyke) and then showed the number with pieces. We learned that we we got to 10, we could select our 10 little pieces and the use the together button to make 1 long! Talk about visualization of ones, tens, and hundreds! You can even take apart a long to show ten pieces! The kids were super engaged and were really grasping the concept by the end of our work time!

Writing and Showing 3

This week, we moved on to previewing the shapes concepts that students will begin working with in real world situations next week. We used the GeoBoard App (click here for the App Store) to show different shapes. We talked about the characteristics of rectangles and squares and their similarities and differences. Students were even able to verbalize the difference between a rectangle and a square! We learned that a square is still a square even when we rotate it (I used Google Slides to demonstrate rotating a shape) or make it bigger or smaller! As long as the shape has four sides and four corners, with all sides being the same length (great use of vocabulary word too!) then the shape is still a square! We also used different colors to show that rectangles have four sides with sides across from each other having the same length (again with that vocab!) We used the same color for all sides of a square because all sides are equal lengths!

Different colored sides for a rectangle 

Same color sides for a square 

Until Next Time...

Mrs. G