More April Happenings

Hey, all,

This'll be a brief one. My house is going on the market this week and there are a bunch of things happening on the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach front so I'm just all aswirl. The students in the lab are doing all sorts of things this week, as usual (new, different="as usual!").

4th graders are looking at tutorial resources on the Webliographer, in the hope that they will turn to those as they come upon features of Microsoft Word that they might need some help with. Especially valuable is the VTC site, which offers manymany screengrab/audio tutorials for free.

3rd graders are exploring Webliographer sites that have to do with the particular Asian country their class is studying. The sites on Japan, China, Korea, and India provide rich resources that will inform the scrapbook writing the students are doing these weeks.

2nd graders get their feet wet with PowerPoint, modifying a template about themselves in the same form they'll be creating one about their insect of choice in the coming weeks. This is a very basic "click to highlight -> type to replace" kind of exercise, but it's fun for them and has some interesting peripheral learning attached, including basic manipulation of . Mr. Merrick says, "Think how much easier this would be if you really learned to type, and remember that when we start to learn home-row key position soon!!!

1st graders and Kindergarteners are continuing exploration of Starfall.com, the marvelous literacy-building site. In slightly different ways, we're all exploring the "2. Learn to Read" section. During the into each student gets to help complete the first activity on the smartboard, completing simple "_an" and "_at" words and seeing and hearing them chunked and combined, then each explores the site on his/her own at her/his computer.

Dat's it for this week, tune in next!