Talkin' Turkey!

Turkeys created with a sort-of-new twist on an old activity. Instead of outlining one's hand on a piece of paper and creating from the resulting line-drawing a turkey for Thanksgiving, my Kindergarteners and 1st graders outlined their hands using the freeware Drawing for Children, then decorated their turkeys, sometimes lavishly, with tools the software program has to offer. The downside of D4Children is that it creates HUGE bitmap files, so I stored them locally and ran around the room when they were done moving them over to a network folder, then quickly pulled that folder to my own computer and deleted it from the network. I then resized the pics, used Photoshop image processing to convert them to small .jpg files, and uploaded the whole kit and kaboodle to Picasaweb Albums (by Google). What you see above is the result.

Departing from the standard "save it, don't print it" green philosophy of the lab, we also printed these for each child and sent them home. I can only imagine Nashville's fridges covered with turkeys for the holidays!

My 4th graders are polishing "All About Me" Powerpoints (we'll finish working the week after Thanksgiving break and start to share them out in class!) and 3rd graders plowing through Type to Learn 3, which we will leave behind as a scheduled lab activity soon. Second graders visited Nova's Trebuchet online and worked on destroying Medieval castles, then chatted with National Geographic's "Ghosts in the Castle" denizens.

I hope that everyone enjoys our pictures and appreciates the wide range of creative approaches to the exercise. We'll see you at Parents' and Granparents' Days and I wish you a happy Thanksgiving!