Have you Filled a Bucket Today?

Today's lesson is one in making others feel good about themselves and will fit well into your character education curriculum.

After reading the book, "Have You Filled a Bucket Today? A Guide to Daily Happiness for Kids," the class brain stormed a list of personality traits. Students came up with words like: kind, nice, respectful, responsible, caring, friendly, helpful, and so on. Each student was asked to expand upon his or her sentence in saying something similar to, "Sally is respectful because she never interrupts people." Instead of just saying, "Sally is respectful." If you have time, I would recommend using a template which has each student in the class listed. Encouraging students to write something nice to say about everyone by using the description words from the brainstorming activity.

After editing sentences, students design their own bucket in a paint/draw program. The images for this particular project were created in Pixie. Whatever you have access to will work. Team with the art teacher in your building and have students draw a bucket in art class then scan the image into the computer. Or during a reduce, reuse and recycle unit, have students build and design their bucket by reusing discarded items like an empty milk carton. Then, use a digital camera to take a picture.

Hopefully, you have access to a student drive and can create a single folder to save the images to. If not, you might invest in a thumb drive for projects such as this. I think you will find uploading images to the internet a little quicker than going into each student's folder and uploading one at a time.

Upload everyone's bucket to Voicethread. Then using a microphone, record the students reading their positive comment about each of their peers. Thus, filling one's bucket.

***With Valentine's Day approaching, you could easily turn this into a holiday lesson by drawing hearts instead of buckets.

Word of the Day

     Have fun introducing new vocabulary to your class by incorporating digital storytelling techniques. Try this. Present a word and allow students to use the new vocabulary word in a sentence. For today's example, I used Microsoft Powerpoint to create a my vocabulary word as an image. Then, I uploaded that image to Voicethread. All that is left now is to have students record themselves using the word of the day in a complete sentence.

Mmm, Marshmallows!

Help your primary students learn the phonemic sound of letter M by using digital storytelling. Present your preschool or kindergarten students with the following sentence to complete by illustration. "Mmm! My favorite way to eat marshmallows..."

I like using Tuxpaint to allow students to draw on the computer because it is free. Use whatever is available to your students. Or, have them color on a piece of paper. Then, you can use a scanner to bring the paper can crayon image into a picture format the computer can recognize.

Log into voicethread.com and upload your students creations. Record students and share your final product with parents. If you have never been to voicethread you will need to sign up. I would suggest using the pro educator account for $10.00.

Below is an example...



I would love to hear how you are integrating technology to teach phonemic awareness in your classroom.

Goodbye Summer: A VoiceThread Activity

Need a Back to School writing activity? Perhaps your class can send Summer a farewall?

Have your students write "Goodbye Summer" poems. Once the poetry is complete, students can illustrate the program using an program like TuxPaint. Then, you can combine all the poems in a class VoiceThread, Photostory, Smilebox, Mixbook, or PowerPoint and share with parents at the back to school night.

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

Leaf Man Visits Burrton

My primary students (K-2) recently participated in a web project created by Marci McGowan called, Leaf Man, Leaf Man What Do You See? Students were able to learn about the fall season while sharing writing, artwork and pictures of their communities on the Internet.

To begin the project, I read the book, Leaf Man to my students. Our Art teacher, Mrs. Cutting, created the frame of our Leaf Man. Then, my children and I decorated Leaf Man. Leaf Man is around 6 ft. tall. We used fake leaves on Leaf Man in hopes that he could be stored for future Autumn resources. After Leaf Man was decorated, he posed for several pictures around our small community.

The Primary (k-1) completed a VoiceThread. I uploaded the pictures and recorded during two class sessions of 20 minutes. This probably could have been done in one session, but we brainstormed things to say on each thread. Here is our end product.



I also wanted to play with a website that was recently introduced to me by Tammy Worcester called Issuu. With Issuu, we were able to publish student drawings from TuxPaint. The students were asked to draw pictures of what they would like to do with Leaf Man if he were alive. I copied the student drawings into Microsoft PowerPoint and then saved the file in ppt format. I used the pdfonline to convert the ppt to a pdf file. Then, I uploaded the pdf file to Issuu. Under "My Library" in Issuu, I found the html code to embed the book into my blog. Lots of steps, but this is the finished product.

Get your own - Open publication

With our Buffaloes (aka Second Graders), we used Mixbook.com to create an online book. I uploaded the pictures and choose a page template to use. Then, the students helped write the text.

| View | Create Your Own Photoproject