Category Archives: Kindergarten

Fall Facts

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The students in Ms. Long’s 1st grade class at Davis have been learning all about fall and the effect that the change of season has on plants, animals, and people. Today they used ChatterPix Kids to create video clips. I used search.creativecommons.org to locate royalty free pictures to use for this activity. I collected them into a folder and shared that folder with the iPads using the Send Anywhere app. After saving the folder of photos to the camera roll on the iPad, students were ready to get started in ChatterPix. We worked in groups of 6, so each student selected a picture and thought about how they wanted to describe that picture. They added a mouth to the photo, recorded their voice, decorated with facial features if the photo did not already have them, and then saved their finished video to the camera roll. Using Send Anywhere, I sent a sampling of the clips back to my computer and mashed them together into a video. Check it out!

Fall Facts from Karen Hues on Vimeo.

Fall Patterns on Pixie App

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Video Oct 02, 10 35 58 AM from Karen Hues on Vimeo.

In this lesson, Kindergarten students practiced searching through the database of Stikers in Pixie to locate fall pictures to use in their pattern. The students created a pattern, labeled the pattern with the paint tools, and then recorded their voice to explain their pattern. After the pattern and recording were complete, the students went to “Send” and “exported their video.” This sends the completed video to the camera roll, which can then be sent to dropbox or Google Drive.

Humpty Dumpty Concept of Word

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The Kindergarten students have been working on concept of word using familiar nursery rhymes. For this activity, the students have been learning Humpty Dumpty. The teacher used cameroid.com to choose the Humpty Dumpty scene. This allowed the students to take a picture of themselves as Humpty Dumpty. From there, the teacher put all of the saved and downloaded photos into a folder in their Dropbox account.

During our lesson, the students went to the dropbox app (the teacher needs to log in ahead of time), and save their photo from dropbox to the camera roll. Once in the camera roll, the students launched the Chatterpix Kids app. This allows the students to bring in their picture, draw a mouth on their picture, and record themselves reading the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme. Here is an example:

Video Sep 17, 8 57 28 AM from Karen Hues on Vimeo.

Finally, we went back to dropbox, created a folder for the Humpty Dumpty videos, and uploaded the students work to this folder in Dropbox. The teacher can then send a dropbox link to each student’s parents so they can view the finished video.

SCA Voting Using Blogs and Google Forms

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This year the SCA teacher reps at Springfield Park decided to move away from using QUIA and use a Google Form instead. Our only issue with the Google Form was that we could not insert images of the students running, so we decided to create an SCA Blog. On the blog, there is a tab for “Meet the Candidates” where the students can see a picture of the student running for office and their speech. Then they click on the “Cast Your Vote” tab and fill out the Google Form to vote for the candidates of their choice. The teacher was able to enable voting the day of the voting and then disable voting at the end of the day. By going to Form –> View Summary of Results, the teacher was able to easily see who the winners were for each office. Google Forms provide a nice pie graph to show the results. Now that the votes are in, they will use their SCA blog to post upcoming events (Spirit Days, after school PTA events, etc).

Kindergarten Explores Elapsed Time

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The kindergarten students in Ms. Dunkum’s class at Baker have been learning about time to the hour. One of their activities involved the students working as a team to decide what a typical day looks like. They planned on a worksheet with 6 or so different sentences: “At _______ o’clock, I _________.” The students then selected their props and set up a scene to photograph to accompany their voice and text in StoryKit on the iPads. Check out their finished products:

Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4

Pumpkin Life Cycle

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Here is a great idea for Kg & 1st Grade teachers. First have your students watch this video from Teacher Tube on the Life Cycle of a Pumpkin. Then have your students open Popplet Lite on the iPads to make a life cycle of a pumpkin. If you have pictures from your pumpkin patch field trip, that would work great! Check out this example from Ms. Lang’s Kindergarten class.

Library Lesson using Document Camera & ActiVotes

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Ms. King, the librarian at Glen Lea, did a fantastic job incorporating technology into her first grade lessons today.  To engage the students, she read “A Sick Day for Amos McGee” using the Ken-A-Vision document camera to project the pages of the story.  The students were excited to get such a great view of the story while Ms. King was reading.  After the story, they answered comprehension questions that were created on Pixie.  The students submitted their answers using the ActiVotes and the results were fantastic!  You could tell that the students had payed really close attention to the book and were excited to share what they knew.  Way to go Ms. King!

Discussing Plants Using VoiceThread

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The students in Mrs. Lang’s Kindergarten class really impressed their teacher on this project. They were each given a sentence about plants. They read their sentence and then used Pixie to illustrate their sentence. When all of the pictures were complete, we uploaded them to VoiceThread. The following week we made Avatars using myavatareditor.com. Finally, the students recorded themselves reading their sentence on their own picture with their avatar in VoiceThread. This was their first time using VoiceThread and the biggest thing we learned is that we really need to speak up in the microphone so that our classmates can hear us when we play it back. Overall, I think they did a fabulous job creating their pictures and avatars and learning how to record voice and draw on VoiceThread. Way to go boys and girls!!

VoiceThread

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One of my favorite Web 2.0 tools is VoiceThread!  I have used it in several classrooms to get the students communicating about the things they are learning in class.  The first step is to build avatars for your children so that their actual pictures are not out on the internet.  There are several great sites for creating your avatar, such as buildyourwildself.com, or you can have your students draw themselves in Pixie.  Then you can use these pictures to add identities on your page.  You only have to create the identities once and they will be on your account forever, or until you delete them.

From Build Your Wild Self Avatar

Next, the teacher uploads photos or videos to their VoiceThread project.  Once the images are uploaded, you are able to share the link with your students so that they can hop on the computer and make comments.  Comments can be typed or spoken.  Both commenting options allow you to have a virtual pen, so you can draw on the page while you are talking or typing your comment.  You can set their preferences so that all comments have to be approved by the teacher before they are posted.  This is a really great way to get your students talking with their peers, other schools, other students in Virginia, students in other states, and students in other countries!  The possibilities are endless.

Identifying & Counting Money

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The Kindergarten students in Ms. Buff’s class at Springfield Park Elementary really enjoyed counting change on Pixie.  We started by reviewing the coins by matching the coin with it’s value.

Next, the students went to the “virtual store” and had to stamp out the correct amount of change to purchase each of the 6 items that I dropped into their folders.  It was very neat to see the different coin combinations that the students would come up with the solve the same problem.  There was a lot of great discussion!