Hold Your Horses! 1st Grade Addition and Subtraction Word Problems!

Wow! I cannot stop bragging on one of my 1st Grade Teachers! I wish this teacher was on Twitter so that I could brag on her! On Monday, I got to meet with my Math Instructional Coach to see "what's coming up." She had told me that this week and next week 1st graders would be solving addition and subtraction word problems. Sure enough, later that day I went into the 1st Grade Teacher's Classroom to see her and her students using the markers to draw on their table. To help get the teacher more comfortable using technology we co-taught this lesson together. I made her a template in explain everything and she taught the content. Fair trade!! Students were so engaged! While the template looks pretty easy, it was anything but! For the addition problems, students were only given 1 item and had to used the "duplicate" feature in Explain Everything to make the proper copies they needed. For subtraction, items were given to them and they had to cross them out. It was fun to hear the responses of the kids when they "turned the page" to the next problem! What item would they see? A puppy? Oreo Cookies? Goldfish???

We had a few "fast finishers" which asked to record their work once finished! Eventually, everyone finished and were able to record!

Check out the example below:

2nd Grade Word Problem Creations!

Wow! These past few days have been crazy busy! Things have really been clicking in 2nd grade! Both of the 2nd grade teachers that I work with on a regular basis have had their students start making word problems using Explain Everything. This might sound easy, but there are a lot of steps involved in this process! For this activity, we got scrapbook paper and stickers from Hobby Lobby and used them for our illustrations. Students would first take a picture of their scrapbook paper and set it as the background. They would then take a picture and use the "lasso" tool to crop it out. Next they would use the "duplicate" tool to make X amount of copies to match their problem. They would then group the batch of pictures. From there, they would either write (type) their word problem or take a picture of it hand-written and paste it into their picture. Finally they would record the problem while moving their grouped pictures around! *Exhales* Seems like a complicated process no? Not for my awesome second graders!

A New 5th Grade ELA Station is Born!

So there is a first year teacher on my campus who reached out to me to see if there was anything we could do to help motivate the students to learn. This particular class is somewhat challenging in terms of behavior but I worked with a few of them last year and technology seemed to help them out and motivate. This teacher along with the other 5th grade ELA teacher and myself all met one Thursday and came up with an idea for stations. While there is no "official" name for this station, I just started calling it the "Tracking your Thoughts" station.

For this station, they put together a Symbaloo page (http://edu.symbaloo.com/mix/5thgradereadingstation1) in which weekly, they will add an article from Time for Kids to it. The teacher has a QR code in which students scan and easily get to the symbaloo. Once they are there, they will click on the given article. We taught the students how to screen shot the articles so that they can get clear text per screen shot. Students then cropped out the excess text and saved the article to the camera roll. A typical article might take 2-3 screen shots. Once they are done with this, students import these screen shots into Explain Everything. Students then lock the image so that they can annotate on it, highlight it and have room to type one it. Students then "track their thoughts" about the article. They will track their thoughts on everything from the text to the images that accompany this article.

Long story short, students were highly engaged with this activity! They cannot wait to roll it into stations. I am really proud of these teachers because it was "just out of their comfort zone" yet wanted to learn about it and implement it!

Meeting Teachers at the Point of Their Need

These past few days have been incredible! Lots of teachers have been wanting to try new stuff out and even go above and beyond! I am not too sure where to start so I will go in 1st - 5th grade order.

1st Grade:
First graders are learning how to create words with a letter template in Explain Everything. We designed a template in which the letters A-Z are placed. We also divided the screen in half- the top half is where the spelling of the word will go. Students learned how to use the "duplicate tool" in Explain Everything to make copies of letters. Once the student spells out the word, they will take a picture of the note cart and place it under the spelled word. Going into this activity, I was a bit nervous in showing the kids how to "duplicate" a letter, but they got it! Once the students got how to do this process, they were able to go at their own pace.

 

 

2nd Grade: 

Lots of stuff going on in 2nd grade. The biggest has been the roll out of SeeSaw. SeeSaw is an online digital portfolio, but can be used for so much more! Students created a "5 finger Just Right Book" in which they explained the process of choosing a book that is "just right" for them. They took pictures of their drawing and then used Explain Everything to record the process of choosing a book. They also did this for an activity in which they had to "show a number 4 different ways." I havent figured out how to embed a See Saw Video but when I do, it will be posted here.  Update: SeeSaw JUST tweeted me back showing me how to embed it! Where the teacher has gained ground is with the parents! Students kept telling their parents, "Look for my work on your cell phone!" See Saw has a feature in which student work can go to parent's cell phone when they are done!

                                

3rd Grade: 

My ELA teacher is in the process of rolling out her class Google Accounts. She is combining this with building Personal Narrative stories. Each day students will log into their Google Account via Explain Everything and complete a task. At the end of the week, students will See-Saw their work back to the teacher as a final product!

 

5th Grade: 

My math teacher was really excited about an idea that she came up with. They are currently working on place value. She wanted students to take pictures of a place value chart and have them copy a number from an index card. Students would then have to match the number under the correct place value. Students would then have to record their voice saying what the number was, and then say which value each number represented! Check it out: 

                                      

Who Said Learning Can't Be Fun??

Wow! These past two weeks of school have been incredible! All of the teachers that I work with regularly are coming to me with things that they want to do in their classroom! It's been non-stop since we came back, but I really enjoy the busyness of it all!

The first activity came from 5th grade. She was set on doing Word Sorts on the iPad. This was something she started doing last year and wanted to start the year with this year. She just started exploring padlet (Pictures / Screenshots will come soon) in which she praised it by saying, "It gives every student a voice to share how the really feel about the text without verbally saying it in front of an audience."

 

The next activity was in 1st Grade. This teacher had a big vision of her students recording their voice over images snapped in Explain Everything.  This particular teacher was really nervous to do an activity because it was their first digital learning activity in her career! I wanted to do something simple such learn the basics of Pic Collage, etc, however the only way we could do what she wanted to do was with the Explain Everything app. After quite a few planning sessions, motivational talks, etc we co-taught and pulled it off! We both thought it was a good idea to teach the student the app first before using it with her content so that is what we had focused on. In partners, students had to create a new file, take pictures of each other, type in their name, record their voice saying their name, re-editing the audio if needed, then saved / exported it out to Google Drive! Mind, you these are 1st Grade students and they did it all! The teacher was so relieved when we were done! We gave each other high 5's as a celebration of her first lesson! Such a proud moment!

Next we had a 3rd Grade Math Teacher who also had her first technology integrated lesson today! I had been wanting to work with this teacher last year however our schedules never really worked out. This year however, she is on our digital learning team and will be using technology on a regular basis!  She wanted her students to compose / decompose numbers in Pic Collage. We co-taught the lesson for 1st period and for 2nd and 3rd period she did it all on her own with me just floating around the room! She really found this activity engaging and challenging for her students! 

 

Our last activity for the day was a Google Hangout. My Science Teacher told me that she really wanted to beef up using technology in Science. We talked about doing a video chat with another school in our district. We found another 4th grade teacher that was willing to do this with us! Collaboratively, we came up with the questions students wanted to ask, however something was lacking. After talking it over with the other Digital Learning Coach, we thought it would raise the impact of the lesson if students could collaboratively work on a Padlet to identify various safe / unsafe behaviors in the Science Lab! He created about 8 Padlets in which we then placed on our website. Students would navigate over to the Padlet and we would go over the question together. Once we went over the question, students would respond. Once finished, students would chat with each other in the hangout and discuss their results! Oh yeah-- I failed to mention-- my Science teacher invited 2 other Science Teachers  + their kids into her classroom! So instead of 20 students, we had about 60! The kids behaved so well! We were all impressed! We plan on doing many more of these soon!