On into Winter Break!

The Short Story:

• 3rd graders are finishing their "All About Me" PowerPoints
• 4th graders are revisiting Scratch Cards toward beefing up their skills with Scratch
• Kindergärtners are making Drawing for Children holiday "cards"
• 1st graders also use the new updated Drawing for Children to make and print holiday cards
• 2nd graders are completing the Medieval "Ghosts in the Castle" online scavenger hunt

The Long one:

3rd graders will share their "All About Me" PowerPoints the week we return after Winter Break, and I'll draw student numbers to determine the order in which we share them. Students will be able to pass with the password "Snarfblatt." That week, I'll choose several to share here at the blog. The kids are having great fun with these and I'm amazed at how much more complete they are than last year's 4th grade work, hopefully an indication that my introduction was a bit more organized and effective!

4th graders are delving more deeply into Scratch, exploring on their own and following up their

initial work on Scratch Cards with lessons I downloaded and printed for them from ScratchEd, a learning network for educators interested in Scratch. I call these cards, letter-sized cardstock lessons, "ScratchBiggies." You may not know what we're talking about, but ask your child what these ScratchBiggies mean:

Making Your Sprite Move
Adding Effects to your Sprite
Create a Comic Strip
Adding Backgrounds, Using Motion, Looks and Control
Using "go to x:__ y:__" to draw shapes
Reacting to the Mouse Pointer...
Sending and Receiving Messages to Change Your Sprite or BackgroundPut the Score on the Stage
Create a Video Game
Use the Paint Editor to Modify Sprites

Kindergarteners and 1st graders are creating fun holiday cards with Drawing for Children on a template I made for just that purpose, it says "Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and Happy Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Diwali, Chinese New Year, and Feliz Navidad! From:" and they draw and stamp and fill in the rest. Here's a slideshow of them I put at the Elementary Technology Educators network:


Find more videos like this on Elementary Tech Teachers

2nd graders work in pairs to learn from Ghosts in the Castle

2nd graders are exploring the National Geographic interactive Ghosts in the Castle and working

in pairs to tackle a Scavenger Hunt for answers to questions about important concepts related to Medieval castles. I randomly pair the kids and have one "run the pencil" and one "run the computer" as they anticipate information by means of the printed question and work together to capture the answer and record it on their sheet. This has worked better than I had anticipated and gives me the chance to share solid written results with their teachers.

That's about all from here. I wish you and yours a wonderful, safe, family holiday beginning at 11:30 tomorrow!!!