The first graders in Mrs. Hall’s class are learning about Matter. Before we got started we reviewed what each state of matter was and some examples. My favorite was having a 6-year old student telling me “A solid’s molecules are tightly packed together.” WOW! I was ready to rock with this class after hearing that.
To start off the lesson, students used Pixie to draw an example of one state of matter. After drawing and labeling the picture, we exported the file as a transparent PNG file into a Matter Pictures folder I had created for the class. Once saved, the students cleared their Pixie page and created a picture of a different state of matter, saving it the same way. We did it a third time for the last state of matter. In as little as 15 minutes, we had 30 picture examples of different states of matter from the 10 pairs of student groups.
Once finished with the examples creation, the students opened up a basic Types of Matter Keynote Template I created. The students then dragged the pictures the class created into the page and sorted the examples. This was a quick and easy lesson, but really fun because the students had a blast creating the entire project. Here’s a finished example from one student:
