USN Lower School Technology!

Monday, February 08, 2010

February 8th through 12

The Short Story:
3rd Graders: Practice for touch-typing success with Keyboarding for Kids
4th Graders: Flex their blogging muscles at kidblog.org with comments
Kindergarteners and 1st Graders tidy up and finish their Valentine cards with Drawing for Children
2nd Graders: Are working at the A+Math "Money Flashcards" experience and then visiting U.S. Mint's official government site, H.I.P, Pocket Change

The Long Story:
3rd Graders have been set up for success at our online Keyboarding for Kids web interface. Unlike the 4th graders, 3rd graders are not required to work at their keyboarding daily, for homework. I still encourage them to practice, now and over the summer and to help them understand the importance of practicing correctly, I'm working with them in February to make progress in the computer lab. In that process, the kids will encounter the small nuances in the program that might frustrate them had they not had that supervised time in-lab. 3rd grade parents, if your child does have problems accessing the site at http://keyboardingonline.com, please let me know via email. I'll try to help. Copious online help is also available at the troubleshooting tips page at Ellsworth Publishing.

4th Graders continue to blog, toward beginning to understand the power of this medium. I will enable comments this week and hopefully we'll move past some of the issues we have previously encountered concerning using the platform at kidblog.org as more of a chat interface than a blogging one!

Kinderkids and 1st graders will finish and print their Valentines from a template they've liberally modified with their own creative approaches to Drawing for Children. Here's a slideshow of our work:



2nd Graders are working for 15 minutes with "how much is it?" money counting flashcards at A+Math and then visiting the wonderful games at the U.S. Mint's official government website. These games are perhaps a bit less flashy than some the children may have encountered online, but they are fun and challenging and some allow for partner play, such as the darts game, and all have some bit of learning built in. Practice with trajectory, acceleration, speed, and timing are all good things!

See you next week! We'll be off Monday for Presidents Day, so enjoy the long weekend with your families!

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