Water Cycle

Third grade students worked through the Water Cycle Min Quest. I had my students create a poster explaining the water cycle using Microsoft Publisher. We saved the files as jpegs and uploaded the images to MagToo to create a slideshow.




Other water cycle resources
NASA Water Cycle
Droplet and the water cycle
Water cycle EPA
Region of Waterloo hydrologic cycle
BBC Water Cycle
Sweetwater.org
Water cycle
Southeastwater.com
Water science for schools:Water Cycle

Brainpop jr. water cycle
Brainpop water cycle

I am always looking to add to my resources. Please let me know what great sites you are using in your classrooms.

We Can Help the Earth!

For an Earth Day project, my primary classes drew pictures in Tuxpaint of what they could do to help the Earth. We put everything together in PhotoStory.

Earth Day Games

If you are looking for Earth Day Games here are a few that might work well during centers in your classroom this week. Within this list, you will find a variety of games for various elementary ages. Most of these games would also work well on your interactive whiteboard. Please let me know what else you are using with your students, so I can add to this list.

EarthDay FunSchool Games

Energy Hog

Save the Beach

Recycle Zone

Wasting Sorting

3R's Most Extreme Challenge

Stop Disasters Game

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle

Third grade students used Glogster to create virtual posters about reducing, reusing and recycling.

Travel Buddy Exchage

My third graders recently participated in a travel buddy project with Rowland Norment Elementary School in North Carolina. This was our first travel buddy and I think the students really enjoyed the activity.

Students took Dino, their travel buddy, home each evening along with a school camera. Students were asked to take pictures and journal about their evening with Dino. We shared our Dino adventures on our blog, "Dino Visits Burrton".


I did try to use a variety of slide show applications to share the photographs that students took of Dino to expose myself to some apps and to give teachers an idea of what each had to offer. Animoto is still one of my favorites. Magtoo has many options to choose from when creating a slideshop. It unfortunately may have content on the website that is not child friendly. Voicethread would be a terrific option for a project like this. Easy to use and highly recommend. I struggle using VT in my district. There is something with our firewall that is not allowing my mic to connect to VT.

If you are unfamilar with Travel Buddies. Make sure and check out this informative post on travel buddies by Dyane Smokorowski (Smoke). Mrs. Smoke even included websites to look for travel buddy partners.

Places to find partner schools...
Global School Net
ePals
CAPSpace (for those with Polycoms)
Skype in Schools
Distance Collaboration on Classroom 2.0

Those that Inspire Us

I visited with Dean Mantz on Friday when I attended an area Technology Integration meeting at ESSDACK. Dean works for USD 376 as an IT and instructional technology integrationist. He also teaches a class at Sterling College entitled, Technology in the Classroom.

Dean recently wrote a blog post about people that inspire us. Dean was kind enough to mention my name along side some women that I respect and consider to be my mentors. Dean, Kevin Honeycutt, Glenn Wiebe, Bentley Richert, and Adrian Howie are just a few male tech integrationists that inspire me. Ginger Lewman, Tammy Worcester, Tuanua Swartz, Dyane Smokorowski, and Mary Fraizer are some of women that I highly respect.

I wanted to pose the question to you. Who inspires you?

Looking for a way to integration this post into your classroom?
Use the above question in your classroom as a digital storytelling project to find out who inspires your students. Re-read this past post for ideas.

BeeBots

While we have been giving our state assessments, my primary students have been in the gym with Dylan learning basic programming with our five BeeBots. Testing has been underway all week in our elementary lab. So primary classes were moved to our gym, where we had lots of room to use our Beebots. We received our BeeBots by participating in a grant from Wichita State University.

I downloaded and printed BeeBot cards from Sparklebox. We have copies of shapes, colors and the alphabet. We have used the BeeBots before, so students were asked to group the 6in cards together. Then the programmers told their partners where the Beebot would stop. If the programmer was correct, they earned a point. We designated one person in each group to keep a score. The kindergarten/turtles did not keep scores, they just took turns being the programmer.

Students were also asked to lay the alphabet cards down in one line. Then practice their spelling words by using the pause button on the BeeBot to signify a letter selection before moving on to the next selection.

With number cards, student can practice solving math facts. I would suggest using flash cards and asking the programmer to send the Bee-Bot to the correct answer.

Our third grade teacher, Emily Schmidt, uses the Beebots quite a bit in her classroom across the curriculum. She has several resources and video clips of using the beebots on her Weebly page.

BeeBot Resources
Kent ICT
BeeBot Wiki
SparkleBox 1000's of Free printables
Emily Schmidt's BeeBot resources