Category Archives: Maybeury

Snow Day Writing in Pixie

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The day after a snow day, the students can’t wait to tell you what they did on their day home from school.  Why not let them all tell you at the same time?  They can all share their stories by opening up Pixie on the laptops and typing away.  The 1st grade students in Mrs. Locher’s class at Maybeury did just that after coming back to school from their snow day.  We started by opening Pixie and selecting a text box.  The students spent about half of the class period typing their stories about what they did on their snow day.  We asked the students to try their best with spelling.  This way their teacher can pull up their work later and use it for an editing station.  Unlike Pages, Pixie allows the students to type their inventive spelling words without putting a red line underneath of the words.  The red lines tend to throw the students off because they want it to be perfect.  After the students had a good amount of typing done, I showed them how they could find pictures to add to their writing.  We discussed how the illustrations needed to go along with the writing prompt.  They found pictures that related to their story and added them to their document.  Finally, we saved their work in their student folders so that they could go back later and continue adding text and pictures to their page.  Here’s an example from one of her 1st graders:

From Snow Day Writing

5 Kingdoms Comic Life

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The 5th Grade students in Mr. Cabaniss’s class at Maybeury did a fantastic job showing the 5 Kingdoms of Living Things through a Comic Life.  His students were free to choose the format they thought would work best. Since we were dealing with 5 Kingdoms, most students chose a layout that had 5 spaces for their information.  I dropped photos into their classroom folder so that they could easily access them and drag them straight into the Comic Life page.  Once their pictures were in place, they added text bubbles to their pictures to explain a few characteristics of that kingdom.  This would be a great activity for the different groups of vertebrates and invertebrates as well.

From 5 Kingdoms Comic Life

States of Matter Videos and Sort in Pages

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Looking for an activity on states of matter?  It could be the first introduction for Kindergarten students, or a review for the upper grades, as this SOL is touched on in all grade levels.  To create this activity, I went to United Streaming and search for states of matter for grades K-2.  You can also search by the SOL number, which is a nice feature.  Rather than downloading the entire 25 minute video, I just downloaded the segments that I needed…a video for solids, another for liquids, and one more for gasses.  After successfully downloading to my desktop, I opened up a new Pages document simply pulled the video clip into my pages document.  I re-sized the videos (just like you would a picture) to make it fit above the 3 columns.  To play the video, the students click 2 times.  To pause the video, click once.  There is a remote control under the quick time tab in the inspector (blue circle with the i) that allows you to navigate through the movie. After watching each video, the students found the pictures of items that belong in that category, and moved them to the correct box. You can make the boxes with the shape tool.  Just be sure to push the boxes to the background so that the pictures can be placed on top.

Thanksgiving Pixie Activities

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In preparation for the Thanksgiving holiday, some of my Kindergarten and first grade classes have been completing these Pixie activities.  In the first activity, the students delete one of the pilgrims, so that only a boy OR a girl pilgrim are left.  Next, they take an oval shaped picture of their face and put it on the pilgrims face.  Then I had the students complete the speech bubble “I am thankful for…”  Finally, the students used the paint can and spray paint to add a fall scene in the background.

On the second activity, we discussed how the First Thanksgiving was a celebration of the harvest among the Pilgrims and Indians.  Students searched through the clip art folders under the stickers tab to add foods to the table that would have been served at the Thanksgiving celebration of 1621.  We discussed how some of the foods we eat today at Thanksgiving are much different than the foods that were available to people at the First Thanksgiving.

Kindergarten 5 Senses

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The kindergarten students have been learning about the 5 senses, so I had a them create a Pixie and label the 5 senses.  They took a picture of themselves on Pixie, glued the picture to the background, and then labeled their eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and hand with the 5 senses.  We practiced resizing and changing the color of the font.  After the students saved their work to their folders, I was able to go back, open all of them up, and then share it as a movie with this cute 5 senses song.  The students loved seeing their work put altogether on the big screen.  If you want to learn how to turn your students Pixie slides into a presentation, please sign up for a consultation.

5 Senses from Karen Hues on Vimeo.

2nd Grade Habitats Project

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The students at Maybeury Elementary have been studying different habitats and how they may change over time.  They also learned how animals must adapt in order to survive in their environment.  The students worked in small groups to research their habitat using the interactive glossary, ebooks, videos, etc on Discovery Education Science.  Next they worked with their teacher to find pictures of their habitat and write a script.  Finally, we filmed one habitat at a time using Photobooth with different photos as the background for different parts of the script.  Here’s an example of the desert habitat group:

Habitats from Karen Hues on Vimeo.

Kindergarten Past & Present Pixie

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The Kindergarten students have been studying the difference between past & present, so I created this activity in Pixie where students can sort the objects into either the Past or the Present.

I would call out a topic such as Presidents, transportation, communication, cooking, etc. and they would have to find the pictures and sort them as either past or present. By going through the pictures one category at a time, we were able to discuss the difference between the past and the present for each topic. In our discussion we talked about how some items, for example the newspaper, is still available today, but that in the past they only had the newspaper, letters, word of mouth to inform them what was going on in the world. In contrast, today we have the television and internet where we can find the news very quickly. This activity was not only a great way to practice sorting, but also led to meaningful discussions on how life was in the past.

1st Grade Fall Pixie Lesson

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The 1st Grade students have been practicing with all of the cool features in Pixie. We began with a template. The students then took their picture and put a hat on their head. Next they typed a sentence about fall and put it in a speech bubble. Last they spray painted leaves and pumpkins on their page. Some students even had time to add clip art. Great work 1st Graders!

5th Grade Numbers Lesson

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The 5th Grade scientists in Mr. Cabaniss’s class at Maybeury are preparing for an awesome project that they will be working on this year.  Their project involves raising trout from the egg stage to the fingerling stage.  Once the trout are at the fingerling stage, they can be released into Virginia’s riverways.  Throughout this experience, the students will be keeping track of the water chemistry in the fish tank and tracking the fish growth.  To keep up with all of this data, the students will be using Numbers to plot data and create graphs.

In our lesson, we practiced graphing data.  We went to weather.com to pull up the 10 day forecast in their zip code to use as our data set.  The students had to input their data into the cells.  Then we highlighted the data and inserted a graph.  We created both a bar graph and a line graph to see which one would be the best to display our data.  We also added a title and manipulated the features on the x-axis and y-axis.  The students are now prepared to graph their trout data in the coming weeks.  Nice job 5th Grade Scientists!!

From Graphing in Numbers

Kindergarten Track Pad Lessons

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Over the last few weeks I have been using this great site to introduce Kindergarten students to the laptop:
http://www.poissonrouge.com/bugs/index
Here students can practice using the track pad to move the arrow and click & drag. I’ve been very impressed by the number of Kindergarten students I have seen practicing using only one hand! Way to go!!

Remember to allow your students time to continue practicing on the computers. Keep up the great work!