I am always searching for creative writing ideas especially for the ICT classes of younger students that I teach. Recently I was looking around the blog of a local computer teacher at Bridge House and I saw that she mentioned a wonderful Literacy website called Communication 4 All. When I opened the page that she referenced I was really excited. I knew that our Grade 1s and 2s would LOVE using one of these freely downloadable templates for story writing.
Let me introduce you to a few of these band then show what the Grade 2s did with them:
a) Well-known stories
b) Winter stories
c) Spring stories
d) Summer stories
e) Autumn stories
f) Historical stories
g) Pirate stories
With my Grade 2 class I gave them a choice of which template they would like to download and strangely enough they all wanted to write about Easter! (They are all looking forward to Easter it seems). Two of the students finished their stories today. I found that OneDrive is great for publishing these PowerPoints online so that the class can share them with their parents. One Drive is a free Microsoft application that gives you free access to a range of Microsoft Office products https://onedrive.live.com If you would like to see how I uploaded these stories to PowerPoint Online in One Drive please visit this post on the SchoolNet blog where I have outlined the process in detail.
The results are shown below. I'm sure you'll agree that displaying these stories on One Drive is a great way to share them with the world.
My personal opinion is that it is vital for a teacher to get on to Twitter in order to find out what is happening in education in the broader community. I have learned SO much from Twitter and am connected to fantastic educators all over the world as a result of using it.This post will show you how to get started. What is Twitter? Twitter is a free social networking service that allows its users to send and read short 140-character messages known as tweets. It’s a fantastic way to share ideas and learn from other teachers – in fact it’s an indispensable tool for educators around the globe. Once you have got started on Twitter and benefitted from networking with other teachers, you’ll wonder how you survived before that! (By the way, my Twitter handle is @fibeal Get started with Twitter
A YouTube tutorial
Here is a five minute YouTube tutorial on getting started with Twitter made by Matthew Frattali. It is fairly old (2012) but it also gives you the general idea.
How BuiLD YouR WiLD SeLF works
The way it works is you start with a human creature and then start adding animal parts. The program was created by the New York Zoos and Aquarium and a link to the New York Zoos and Aquariums can be found on the website pages.. It is a very easy site to use. No registration or logins are required. To get started enter a name, choose boy or girl, and add various body parts. One just follows the prompts and makes choices from the various options continually. You can view the names of the animals as you mouse over each part of the options offered.
This tutorial from YouTube gives the step by step process
Creative writing task
After my Grade 6 class had created their wild selves on the site I set them a creative writing task: 'Write about a short dream adventure you had when you changed into half human half animal. What happened?" Here are examples from three of my students:
Student 1:
"One morning I woke up from my first sleep in the Californian jungle (I was there to observe birds) I saw the Condor a beautiful bird. Secretly I wished I had wings like that so I can fly and have a birds eye view. The next I knew I had developed the wings I had wished for. I set off to observe all the lovely birds."
Student 2:
"I was running away from the flock of birds chasing after me when my foot got stuck in a puddle of mud. I tugged and yanked but my foot would not move. The birds came racing past me, cutting my face with their sharp claws and beaks. That’s when I fell over, my face half submerged in a puddle of water. “None of this is real,” I whispered to myself. I rolled over into puddle and swam through the water. “Ahh!” I yelled out in agonising pain. There were wings sprouting out of my back and my legs were turning into jelly-fish tentacles. I was become half an animal! I woke up with a gasp. “Thank goodness it was only a dream,” I said. “Oh no…” I muttered, looking down at tentacles floating in the water around me…."
Student 3:
"I was at the zoo and I was watching the tiger in its cage.
It was so big and beautiful to look at. It looked friendly! I felt an urge to
touch it, so I nervously put my hand slowly through the cage. Then, all of a
sudden I found was in the Sahara desert. I was half tiger and I could run as
fast as lightning. I had the most beautiful wings and I could fly high in the
sky as well. It was awesome! I flew around the desert looking at all the other
animals. Then I landed. The animals came
running to me and they started talking to me. They showed me everything and
introduced me to their families. They gave me a special place to sleep and I
flopped into bed filled with excitement and wonder. In the morning, when I woke
up, the animals were gone! My wings were gone and I wasn’t half tiger anymore,
The special cave I had slept in was
gone. That’s when I realised it was only a dream…"
This was a fun activity - the students enjoyed it!
This year I am very keen that all my classes from Grade 3 - 7 have their own blogs. I have made the decision to use the following platforms: Grades 3 and 4: Kidblog Grades 5,6 and 7: Blogger blogs
One of the things I love about using Google Apps is that you can use Blogger with Under 13s and have control over the blogs. I love the seeing how everything from Google works together! So far the Grade 6s and 7s have their blogs. They loved creating them I have to say! Tomorrow is the turn of the Grade 5s.
This is the presentation that I have created and added to Google Classroom as a guide should any of them not get finished creating their blog during my lesson with them.
This year I wanted to introduce a Grade 5 class to Google Slides in a collaborative way. Last year, with this class, we did a lot of work using Microsoft PowerPoint. I have to say that Microsoft PowerPoint is still one of my favourite applications for all time mainly because of all the different ways you can use it - but using it collaboratively is really not easy at all. Google Slides offers that benefit - so it is becoming a firm favourite.
Lesson goals
I wanted the students to:
experience how easy it is for a whole class to use one Google document at the same time
learn how to share the finished product to their own Google accounts
complete the task at home if they didn't finish
learn the inns and outs of images, fonts, and background colour
Giving the assignment
Naturally, I created the lesson using Google Classroom. The students opened their Google accounts and logged on to Google Classroom and away we went!
The task
The class had to open the slide presentation I had created and shared in Google Classroom. It had an example slide. Their task:
add a slide and create something similar
write an acrostic poem description of themselves using adjectives
add an avatar image they had created in a previous lesson and crop it
add their names using WordArt
use colour for their selected fonts
colour the background
The results
The class enjoyed this task and they loved looking at each others' completed slides.
Other collaborative lesson ideas for Google slides
Here are three ideas I want to try soon:
Do a collaborative project in groups
Write a collaborative story using Google slides
Learn how to organise research on a collaborative slide presentation (idea via Richard Byrne's blog)
I have been wanting to get my Grade 6s to work on a collaborative Google document successfully for some time now! The first time I tried out the idea of a collaborative document with Grade 6, to my dismay, they starting deleting one another's work on purpose! It was rather a nightmare! So, after a few admonitions and discussions, I attempted the task again! This time it worked out very successfully. I used Google Drawings for the lesson..
The origin of the lesson idea
The lesson idea was adapted from a lesson found on Chris Clementi's wonderful Google site. She created a great Google Drawing lesson called Animal.
Lesson goals
Work collaboratively on a Google Drawing template
Add images and resize them
Link the images to information about the animals
Present a 1-2 minute oral report back on one of the animals researched
Giving the assignment
I used Google Classroom to assign this lesson. It is just so easy and seamless doing it this way.
The task The class had already had a lesson on how to research using Google Drive. In this assignment they had to:
Use a shared template in Google Drive
Work on one animal at a time and negotiate the next animal they tavked with the rest of the class (it is a small class so this wasn't too chaotic).
Find a suitable image, add it and resize it.
Find a site containing simple factual information about the animal and link that to the image.
Decide on one of the animals chosen and present five facts about that animal orally to the class namely description, habitat, breeding habits, food, and one other interesting fact.
The results
The students completed the task collaboratively with no hiccups, and they negotiated the division of animals amicably. This was a great lesson. There are a few errors on the final document that need to be corrected as you can see below:
Improvements for next time
Next time I will use the filtered image search function in Google Drive so that students use only images with the Creative Commons license
I would recreate the template so that the name can be linked to the facts while the image itself gives the right accreditation.
