Kindergarten students at Holladay Elementary have been learning about living and nonliving things in Science (SOL K.6) and how to spell words phonetically to describe pictures in Language Arts (SOL K.12c). Today students in Ms. Ambrose’s class used ABCYa!Storymaker to draw and write about a living or nonliving thing. First we brainstormed a variety of things so that the students weren’t all drawing the same ones. Then they used the paint tools to draw a picture of the item they chose. This requires the students to practice clicking and dragging, which is an important computer skill. They also quickly learned how to use the undo button to fix mistakes (and we explained that, unfortunately, life doesn’t have an undo button). Next, we clicked the writing button on the side and a familiar-looking sheet of lined paper appeared on the screen. I showed them how to use Shift to make a capital letter, and we all typed the first word of our sentence, “I.” Then we typed “am a,” and the students finished their sentences with the name of their object, spelled phonetically. You can see them all here.
