Today second graders in Mrs. Fugate’s class at Mehfoud Elementary reviewed the three Native American tribes: Powhatan, Lakota and Pueblo. We used PowerPoint to make a movie about the tribes’ location, occupations, modes of transportation and their homes.

Students navigated to {THIS} template that I dropped into the Student Server. Students added their name to the title slide and then clicked on slide #2. Here they dragged the name of the tribe and the location to the correct part of the map that was set as the background image. The three remaining slides represented the important information about each tribe. On each slide I had already placed a tee-pee, adobe house and canoe. If the item(s) didn’t match up with the tribe, then we taught the students how to click on the image they didn’t want and delete.

To add pictures to the slides, we taught the students how to go to Insert>Online Pictures and type in keywords that would represent the tribe’s occupations, modes of transportation and type of house they lived in. The only issue we ran into was that the Bing image search could not locate longhouses for the Powhatan tribe. We found what we thought was the inside of a longhouse so all of the students used that same image and then used the text box tool to add “longhouse” as a label.

Finally, students went to Slideshow>Record Slideshow and talked about information that was presented on each slide. This was an hour lesson and we did not have time to animated the pictures or add slide transitions.

Even thought we didn’t get to all of the bells and whistles of PowerPoint, I still feel like this was a very effective lesson…. Students were engaged and working with all of the key terms associated with the three different tribes. They were constantly comparing and contrasting the tribes! We hit on the geography of the US with the map slide. Using keywords for the image searches was a new skill for these 2nd graders. Then we had all of the computer skills that were hit: clicking and deleting, re-sizing images, dragging and dropping, working with text boxes, re-sizing text and navigating around PowerPoint.

I’m so proud of the hard-work Mrs. Fugate’s class put into their videos this morning!

Check out Imogene’s final video:

Imogene’s Native Americans from Julie on Vimeo.

Today second graders in Mrs. Fugate’s class at Mehfoud Elementary reviewed the three Native American tribes: Powhatan, Lakota and Pueblo. We used PowerPoint to make a movie about the tribes’ location, occupations, modes of transportation and their homes.

Students navigated to {THIS} template that I dropped into the Student Server. Students added their name to the title slide and then clicked on slide #2. Here they dragged the name of the tribe and the location to the correct part of the map that was set as the background image. The three remaining slides represented the important information about each tribe. On each slide I had already placed a tee-pee, adobe house and canoe. If the item(s) didn’t match up with the tribe, then we taught the students how to click on the image they didn’t want and delete.

To add pictures to the slides, we taught the students how to go to Insert>Online Pictures and type in keywords that would represent the tribe’s occupations, modes of transportation and type of house they lived in. The only issue we ran into was that the Bing image search could not locate longhouses for the Powhatan tribe. We found what we thought was the inside of a longhouse so all of the students used that same image and then used the text box tool to add “longhouse” as a label.

Finally, students went to Slideshow>Record Slideshow and talked about information that was presented on each slide. This was an hour lesson and we did not have time to animated the pictures or add slide transitions.

Even thought we didn’t get to all of the bells and whistles of PowerPoint, I still feel like this was a very effective lesson…. Students were engaged and working with all of the key terms associated with the three different tribes. They were constantly comparing and contrasting the tribes! We hit on the geography of the US with the map slide. Using keywords for the image searches was a new skill for these 2nd graders. Then we had all of the computer skills that were hit: clicking and deleting, re-sizing images, dragging and dropping, working with text boxes, re-sizing text and navigating around PowerPoint.

I’m so proud of the hard-work Mrs. Fugate’s class put into their videos this morning!

Check out Imogene’s final video:

Imogene’s Native Americans from Julie on Vimeo.