I want to first start off by saying that working with amazing ITRTs like Julie Goode make my job so much more fun. If you aren’t following her blog, you should be. She comes up with some great ideas to use in the classroom, and I modified this lesson to use with with Ms. Catlin‘s class at Carver Elementary today.
Ms. Catlin’s 2nd grade class is learning about fractions in math and Ancient China in social studies. Ms. Catlin came up with a great idea of doing a cross-curricular activity incorporating some of the content that her students need to know about Ancient China. Our main focus for the lesson was Fraction Word Problems, but we decided the content of each word problem would be incorporated with Ancient China. I took Ms. Goode’s awesome Keynote template and modified it.
The first thing the students needed to do was write their two fraction word problems. After doing this, the students typed them into the slides and dragged the items they wanted to use in the “Fractions as a Set” page. After we had these pieces all set, we used the “Build Out” function in the Build Inspector for the pieces that we wanted to explode, burn up, or fly away. Once we had it all set up, we recorded ourselves with the “Audio” function in the Document Inspector. This by far was the best part because we were able to make funny sounds to go along with the builds–I think I got a little too excited with it… Finally, we exported them as a Quicktime movie! Check out my example I showed the students along with some student examples.
