Native American Wordle

Our 5/6th grade AG class has been working on researching various Native American tribes in the United States including elements like housing, dress, government, food, and how they survive their climate. The used this information to write a paper including full citations, then also created a Wordle from their finished paper (after editing and typing!) The AG teacher and I discussed how to grade the Wordle since if they are using a variety of vocabulary you can't count on certain words to stand out. As a result, what we settled on for the Wordle grade is relevance of the larger words to the tribe as a whole. (The paper is getting its own separate grade to be combined with the Wordle grade.) Here are some of the finished Wordles and some pictures of the citations being created and paper being edited and typed.

Citation Maker

Edited paper and creating Wordle

Editing and Typing

Making your Wordle

They enjoyed the Wordles and they are quick and simple to do with an already typed paper! It helped them see the main ideas of their papers in a very visual way!

Easter Fun!

Usually I don't get a lot of time for just fun stories and activities with the kids due to all the things we need to cover and I mostly focus more on information sources, Super 3, and things like that. However, sometimes we have a double class and I take the opportunity to have fun with some books and activities with the kids, especially around holidays! Today I had a Kindergarten class and it is the day before Spring Break, so we read a couple of books about Easter eggs, and then I had the kids create Easter eggs using patterns of colors. (I knew they were working on pretty advanced patterns in their calendar time in the classroom by this time of year.)

Here are the books we read and some of their patterns!

Lino It!

I just came across a great resource called Lino that I thought a lot of us could use in a lot of different ways. I have just started playing with it but I think it could be used in a thousand different ways. You could use it as grade levels to collaborate and share sources or ideas, you could use it with students to pose a question and have them each post a sticky note response, use it as a brainstorming board with students, and probably a lot more I haven't thought of yet! Let me know if you come up with other good ideas! My first thought was collaboration, my second thought was you could have a daily question that students each post an answer sticky note.

Here is an example of one I started brainstorming some of the projects I do with my 3rd graders.

It says there is no limit to the number of boards you can have and is easy to figure out and use. It is free, you just need an email to make an account. You can embed them on your website, give links, make them public or private, and allow others to also post sticky notes. Could be a great resource for LTMs (Learning Team Meetings at my school where grade levels meet to plan) or for a canvas for each unit you do with your grade level? Just a thought that I wondered if some of you might be able to use. Here is a how to.

Have a great Wednesday!

Who We Are

I have not been posting as much the last week or so because we have been busy here at Caleb's Creek getting ready for a school board presentation about our school. We do so much here that we wanted to show it was hard to pare it down, get it together, find video and pictures to represent so many things, but we did it! Here is our final presentation that my principal gave to the school board. After the first few information slides, you will see slides with video and pictures representing each level of the Bloom's Taxonomy, and then some other videos too. As you are looking at the presentation, just either click on the slide or use the space bar to advance to the next video or slide.

Egyptian Newspapers

A class about to read The Egypt Game came in to do some quick research on an aspect of Egypt. We let them look around the livebinder I had made and choose their own topic, but we talked about thinking about narrowing down a topic so it is not too broad. Many of them chose a god or goddess which surprised me. I thought most of them would want to do something with mummies or pyramids. Some did those, and some did particular Pharoahs also, but the majority were researching a god.

Our original plan was for them to do a museum box but I am still learning how to use that so we changed it to the newspaper generator. I was excited to use it, I posted about it earlier this year, but had not used it with a class yet. We had the students type their articles and do citations in Microsoft Word first so they could save it, spell check, and edit since you can't save it in the newspaper generator. Once they had that, they went to the newspaper site and just copied and pasted it in. NOTE: The newspaper generator only allows a certain amount of text. It didn't say that anywhere on the site, so we didn't know, but it would cut off the articles partway through if they were longer or not have all the citations, etc. So, we just had the students print off their Word document also to be able to grade the whole thing, which was another plus for having them type it in Word first.

The kids really got a kick out of making their articles look like they were actually in a newspaper. I do wish they didn't limit the space amount though.

Here are some samples of finished products - keep in mind some got cut off.

Please keep helping us try to win $25,000 for our school!

I have been nominated for "Best Teacher in America" from Worth Ave Group! Please consider following this link and voting for me by 'nominating' me as well to help our school win! The $25,000 for technology in the school would be well used!! (There is a voter prize as well!) You can nominate once a day per email address through March 31st. The teacher that receives the most nominations can win for the school:

GRAND PRIZE (1): The winning Nominated Teacher ("Winning Teacher") will receive (1) iPad 2 16GB unit and (30) iPod Touch 8GB units for use in Winning Teacher’s classroom. The Winning Teacher’s School will be given $25,000 to be used for technology in the School.

SECOND PRIZE (5): Each Nominated Teacher who is a runner-up (“Runner-up”) will receive (1) iPad 2 16GB unit as well as $1,000 to be used for technology in the School.

VOTER PRIZE (10): 1 iPad 2 16GB to 5 random voters and 1 iPad 2 16 GB to the persons who referred each of them.

Please consider taking a minute and nominating Holly DuBois at Caleb's Creek Elementary in Forsyth County in NC. (Or taking a minute each day!) Thank you!

Voting ends soon (on March 31st) and every vote counts!

Jog the Web to Learn About Coca-Cola

I recently learned about Jog the Web, a source that lets you take a group of sites you want kids to go through, add your comments or directions, and it puts it into a webquest sort of format for you. (You can also search for and use other people's 'Jogs' that they have done.) I have a teacher currently working on a cookie marketing project with his students where they are designing cookie companies complete with budgets, storefronts, ads, recipes, and more. He asked for some advertisement sources that show advertising over history, so I collected some into a livebinder for him. When I found Jog The Web, I thought it would be a good topic to try it out on, but you could do it with anything. I narrowed it down to Coca-Cola ads over time to see how they have changed, since that is one product and one they should be familiar with. Below you can see how it looks with the directions at the top of each page directing students to think about things like who are the ads aimed at, what are they using to make you want to buy the product, and how have the ads changed over time. On the left are arrows that take them through the sites, or they can click on the page titles below the arrows.

This is a screenshot of the Jog I made about Coke.

Jog the Web was very easy to use and you can find lots of short video tutorials. I really liked this one that I posted below, and it showed me enough in about 5 minutes to get me off and running. I made my jog in about 5-10 minutes once I had all the sites I wanted to use.

If you create a Jog, please leave the url and topic in the comments below! I think my next one might be on different authors maybe?

How to make a Jog using JogTheWeb from James Smith on Vimeo.