Kindergarten students in Ms. Sharpe’s class at Trevvett Elementary have been reading The Little Gingerbread Man and other gingerbread stories this week. Today I showed them how they can make their own gingerbread men using this website. Kindergarten students are used to using their fingers on the iPads, but in order to prepare them for using laptops, they need to practice clicking and dragging using the trackpad. So any website that reinforces those skills is worth incorporating into your lessons occasionally. Her students were also able to follow one and two step directions (K.3g) as I showed them how to choose from different colors of frosting and different sized nozzles to decorate their virtual cookies. When they were finished, we clicked the save button, and tried typing their names, but some of them just typed the first letter. Then we uploaded them to a Padlet that you can see here. Now it’s easy to refer back to these images for future oral language practice or even to review math concepts. Since their work is shared online, Ms. Sharpe can send the link home to parents, and they can view their child’s work, print it out, or email it to friends and relatives. The best part about decorating digital gingerbread cookies–there was no mess to clean up!
