After the Mayday Floods

Hi all,

I hope you're all safe and well after the recent deluge. I gather that many of our families suffered loss or damage and I'm thankful that no lives have been lost.

I at first was dubious about getting back to school so quickly and I do miss the opportunities to volunteer that are so needed in our community, but after a couple of days with your children just being around them has done so much for my own state of mind and emotions that I am glad we're back at work.

Here's the skimmy on what we are doing:

The Short Story:
3rd graders finish and print their Asia Scrapbook covers
4th graders re-enter Quest Atlantis to make progress before the end of the school year
Kindergarteners revisit Kerpoof to "Make a Doodle"
1st graders revisit Kerpoof to learn more about how to "Make a Movie"
2nd graders make and print a new graph at the NCES Create a Graph site

The Long Story:
3rd graders finish and print their Asia Scrapbook covers from a Microsoft Word template. It's easy to do but getting it done with all 18 students in a class in our allotted 25 minutes is quite fun and chaotic. Here's one example of the results:

4th graders re-enter Quest Atlantis to make progress before the end of the school year. I am introducing the 5th graders to this marvelous, safe, interesting platform this week (re-introducing most of them, as we quested to positive effect for much of last year in their 4th grade) and I'm hoping that our new collaboration with the Middle School will turn into something good for all of us--for the students, the technology team, and the families. Stay tuned!

Kindergarteners revisit Kerpoof to "Make a Doodle." This is Kerpoof's simple but fun painting/drawing tool, and Kindergarteners discover this week how to draw a shape--triangle, square, even star--and as long as they carefully end where they began it, Kerpoof straightens and evens out all the lines to make a "perfect" shape! We're printing these for refrigerators but not saving them.

1st graders revisit Kerpoof to learn more about how to "Make a Movie" there. This is a pretty powerful feature of Kerpoof. I have set the kids up with their own accounts and logins, the benefit of which is that they can save projects and revisit/extend them at future logins. I'm working on a little book with the "Make a Story" feature myself and I'll share it out here when it's complete. It's about an alien who trips over his tongue all the time...

2nd graders make and print a new graph at the NCES Create a Graph site. We did so last week and I'm pleased to see most 2nd graders able to complete the exercise this week, emerging with a graph displaying data taken by quick voice poll on a topic we choose at the moment. Actually, the 2nd grade has split focus to some degree this week, and two classes are involved in other activities--Ms. Pitt's class is finishing "All About Me" style PowerPoints, and Ms. Darr's students enjoy the first third of a movie that Lillian brought in to share. "MicroCosmos" is an absolutely stunning G-rated film distributed by Miramax that makes use of very high tech photography techniques to share the lives of insects in real life. Not an animated movie, you can read more about it and see a trailer at the Miramax MicroCosmos website!

Stay safe!