Today Mrs. Newsome at HSES invited me to her classroom to introduce her kindergartners to some new apps they could use during their word study center. We went over a few of the apps that are on our image and then I showed them how to use the Sticky app to type out words in their sorts. Typing is always a slow process for the little ones but I was truly amazed how quickly her kiddos caught on. It may have helped that I was only working with 4 at a time 
Edward, one of her students, was ROLLING with adding “tr” digraph words to his sticky board. Digraphs do not come easy to children at this age (in my experience). I was able to take Edward to the next level during our 15 minute rotation and show him how to import his digraph sticky creation into Shadow Puppet and create a movie. We love using Shadow Puppet to show one to one correspondence in math and/or tracking words for reading. Edward added a title, his name, a little background music and recorded himself introducing his topic and reading aloud his words. As he read, he tapped the word on the screen to make a “star” quickly appear and then disappear to show his word recognition skills. After viewing the movie, Mrs. Newsome and I could tell that Edward has the “tr” digraph down but needs to work on VCe words. He froze when he came to the word “trace” and you will hear me whisper the word to him. Technology activities can tell you so much about a child’s strengths and weaknesses, not just quizzes and tests! Overall I was super impressed with Edward’s abilities to make such a high quality product in 15 minutes. He is now going to teach the others in his class how to smash these two apps together to make a movie.
