This post is part of my continuing series of weekly lesson summaries. My goal is to give parents & caregivers in our school community the resources needed to extend student learning at home, and to share my professional practice with teacher colleagues around the world in the interest of improving my craft.

Week ending 05/04/12

Kindergarten

What we covered / did / explored:

• This was yet another week in which we pushed the ‘free play’ time to the end of the lesson due to an exceptionally challenging activity. We’re in “Mother’s Day” mode in Computer Lab this week, with projects involving Mom in every grade.
• Although we covered “days of the week” last time, I found and wanted to use a fun whole-class warmup activity called “Weekdays” at Cookie.com. It would have been perfect last week but was still worth exploring. Students took turns answering the questions (names selected by the SMART Board). It was more challenging than it looks as kids had to visually and audibly distinguish the days of the week, their sequence, etc. It was a fun way to start the class.
• I introduced the lesson, a Mother’s Day ‘card’ via PowerPoint, by showing students the six different templates I’d developed for them. Technically speaking, their tasks were straightforward; they only needed to add text for a message and their name, and add their photo. We’ve done this lesson for years and it’s always a Mom favorite.
• Once I showed everyone how to enter the text they wanted, students went to their computers, chose a template and started working. As they worked, I took photographs (the child above is not an NCS student; I found the photo via Google.) We intentionally did NOT correct student spelling or capitalization as we wanted this to be authentic student work.
• Once students inserted their pictures (see below) we saved the files so I could print them off. Students then got to choose an activity. Monster Milktruck continues to dominate!

What I learned / observed / inferred:

• This is usually one of the most challenging lessons we do every year. Developmentally, I think Kindergarten is too early for PowerPoint, so I go to extremes to make things as simple as possible based on what I know the kids should be able to do. In this case, they needed to enter some text, use the space bar, enter their name with a capital letter, use the enter key, and select their photo from a Windows explorer thumbail selection. All were successful, some more than others, but everyone got it done.
• This lesson would NOT BE POSSIBLE without Lanschool, a $200 software program I received for FREE at the NJEA Convention last year. Lanschool makes it possible for me to have every PC logged in and ready to go with all the templates loaded, and to remotely control all the PCs at once to get them to a particular part of the project (i.e., when it is time to insert their photos). It can be EXTREMELY challenging and Lanschool sometimes does not work as well as the solution we had before (Altiris) but we were successful!

What students can do at home:

• Play “Weekdays” at Cookie.com together – I think you’ll see your child knows their days of the week very well. Ask them if they remember why the voice sounds funny; we talked in class about the voice being “computer generated” – they were amazed by that.

First Grade

What we covered / did / explored:

• Our First Grade Mother’s Day project literally elicited cheers when I announced it. Kerpoof is incredibly versatile, supremely easy to use, powerful beyond imagination (the video animation tools are particularly impressive, but we don’t use them in elementary – yet). Students were asked to create a Mother’s Day Card using appropriate images and text. (Note: the example above is not student work.) They also entered text, changed its attributes, positioned, resized, flipped & turned objects to get the layout right. Some kids even used the image search feature.

What I learned / observed / inferred:

• The best technology applications are the simplest. Kerpoof can be used right away (no sign-on required) and the interface is crazy simple. Kids “get” what to do instantly and constantly find and use features I haven’t even demonstrated. One example is the drawing tool. A student showed me how she wanted to create flower stems to place in her project underneath some roses. We were able to figure it out together. She was thrilled. So was I – that she came up with the idea!
• Kerpoof is a Disney property – and I am so glad they have NOT overrun it with Disney merchandise and other advertising. It remains untouched, the way it’s always been. Thanks Disney!

What students can do at home:

• x

[IMAGE]

Second Grade

What we covered / did / explored:

• We warmed up with Typing Pal, recognizing members of the “Zero to Hero Club” for getting no mistakes on their practice lessons.
• When finished, students gathered on the carpet in front of the SMART Board to review what we worked on last week – coupon Powerpoint for Mom. We demonstrated how to open files from the network share, “enable editing” in Office 2010 (thank you, Microsoft), and other related editing tasks.
• Students proofread their work for errors, then printed and cut out the coupons, stapling them into booklets.

What I learned / observed / inferred:

• It is amazing how creative these kids are, and how efficient they are with using Powerpoint at this age!

What students can do at home:

• Practice keyboarding with Typing Pal. Celebrate with them when they achieve “0 errors” because accuracy is more important than speed. Speed comes as their finger muscles mature!

Third Grade

What we covered / did / explored:

• We warmed up with Typing Pal, recognizing members of the “Zero to Hero Club” for getting no mistakes on their practice lessons.
• Students logged into Glogster EDU to finish and print their projects.

What I learned / observed / inferred:

• The Glogster EDU service has been much more reliable for us since they agreed to give us multiple free Teacher Premium accounts. The servers are fast, errors are greatly reduced and things just move a lot more smoothly!

What students can do at home:

• Practice keyboarding with Typing Pal. Celebrate with them when they achieve “0 errors” because accuracy is more important than speed. Speed comes as their finger muscles mature!
• If students remember their Glogster EDU login, they can access this resource from home. If they don’t remember the login, please contact me.

Fourth Grade

What we covered / did / explored:

• We warmed up with Typing Pal, recognizing members of the “Zero to Hero Club” for getting no mistakes on their practice lessons.
• Students came to Computer Lab having pre-written acrostic poetry (or something approximating it, as above, which is not student work). Students created colorful full-page Word projects pusing images, text boxes, formatting tools and more. These are pretty impressive when printed in color and laminated!

What I learned / observed / inferred:

• Spelling is still a developing skill for fourth graders! That said, they did dream up some impressive wording!

What students can do at home:

• Practice keyboarding with Typing Pal. Celebrate with them when they achieve “0 errors” because accuracy is more important than speed. Speed comes as their finger muscles mature!