What would you do with a ______ like this?

Fourth graders have been working on animal adaptations in their media classes. We each researched a different animal to find out an adaptation of that animal. Then, following in the style of the Steve Jenkins book What Would You Do With a Tail Like This?, we created powerpoint slides of our animals. Most students were able to find pictures of their animal on Pics 4 Learning also! Here are a few sample slides from some of the students.

Beavers Blabber

The 4th grade AG group is working on researching different aspects of beavers as they Sign of the Beaver. Here is our first Blabberize from their research. Thanks Connor for letting us share it!

India Opal Buloni's Fakebook Page

Mrs. Hentz and Mrs. DuBois worked together with her third grade class to create a whole group Fakebook page for Opal from Because of Winn Dixie. We will add to it as we finish the book, but it was a great way to review the sequence of the book as well as delve deeper into character traits of various characters in the book as we talked about who would post what and why. For example, the kids talked about Otis being shy so he might be nervous about who was coming to the party since he was going to play his guitar. The only issue we had was sometimes we chose a picture to represent a character and instead of using what we chose, it copied the picture from the character above it. Not sure why this was happening, but it was minor. Here is our page!

Pigtail Fridays!

Ms. Wessell started Pigtail Fridays and it looked like so much fun others are joining in! Since we didn't have school this Friday it became Pigtail Thursday.

Fakebook Fun

A third grade teacher and I are going to try Fakebook with the kids this week using the main character from Because of Winn Dixie. In preparation, I thought I should give it a whirl for myself. It is a lot of fun and looks a lot like the real thing. You create your own friends though and make up the comments from them, but kids will respond to becoming the literary character or historical figure and I can see using this quite a bit. It is also a good way to teach them some of the online safety issues without using the real thing. Here is  one I made as an example (you can also see it below) using Barack Obama in about 20 minutes, some of that time being figuring out what to do, so the real thing once you have the hang of it will probably go faster. Of course kids will take as long as you give them playing with it, but if they are playing on task, that is the point!

View Fullscreen

Create your own

Voki about plants

Another way to present the same plant information without having to record student voices is to use Voki. You can record or type the text and create your own avatar figure as well. Here is an example using almost the same information as the Blabberize in the last post.

Plant Blabberizing

Blabberize is a super fun way to present information, if you can get it to work. It took me several tries today to get the record function to work for my sample, so I have to test it a bit more before we use it, but my goal is to use Blabberize with third grade research as a way to present some information we find out plants. It is so much fun to do and a quick way to present the information, when it works right! Here is a short example I made today with the dandelion. I tried to embed it below, but it seems to sometimes not be working!