Our Grade Ones love using 'Teach your monster to read'

The online version of Teach Your Monster to Read is free and my Grade 1s love it.  I allow them to use it in the last 10 minutes of our computer lessons https://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com/. Whenever I announce that it is time to play our reading game, I get a chorus of 'Yays'!

What is Teach your Monster to Read? 

This literacy game has been funded by the Usborne Foundation, a charity set up to support initiatives to develop early literacy. The program is free if you use it online, but you pay to use it as an app.  

The game is for children in the first stages of learning to read, or for older children who need a bit more practice. There is a video trailer on the Home page of the online version of 'Teach your monster to read' that shows how the game works. 

How does it work?

The information provided on the website version says, "The game takes children on a magical journey, meeting colourful characters along the way and collecting fantastic rewards. When children are engaged, they’re motivated to learn. As they progress, they rehearse a range of essential reading skills; matching letters to sounds, blending, segmenting, tricky words and reading full sentences."

Commonse Sense Media provides great reviews of programs on their website. This is one of their reviewers, Caryn Lix, says about "Teach Your Monster to Read" https://bit.ly/3cSm4Zt. 

"Teachers can have students play the game at home or at school. Each student creates an account, which allows teachers to monitor their progress through a dashboard, including how often they play, what games they're playing, and how well they're doing. This makes it a great way to assess basic reading and prereading skills as well as a fun way for kids to learn, on their own time and on their own terms. Students can also use the story as a starting point to come up with their own creative ideas: Write stories about how their monster damaged its ship, for example, or design their monster's home world in art class. Flash cards also provide an opportunity for students to review frequently confused sounds." 

How do you enrol students as a teacher?

You go to the website and sign up for a free teacher account. After that you create multiple players and give each student their login credentials.  The players log in to thir account and play. The app keeps a record of where they are at. As a teacher you can track their progress. The players can use these login credentials to log in to the app on any device, even when they're at home.

All I do in my Grade 1 Google Classroom is provide the link to the login page.  The students click on that and then each one signs in with their credentials - and they start playing and learning.

This is a great online game to add to your Grade 1 collection!

The Grade 7s created posters about their strengths using Adobe Spark

In this lesson the students were encouraged to think about their strngths and make a poster about them that included a photo. isn't it strange that most people cannot think of their strengths but can rattle off their weaknesses!  We used Adobe Spark to create the posters. 

What is Adobe Spark?

Adobe Spark (https://www.adobe.com/express/) is one of those programs that teachers love because the students can easily create social media posts and graphics, web pages, and videos fairly quickly — with no design or technical experience necessary.

Some examples of the posters

I thought the posters were great.

Grade 7s created stories from pictures and turned them into videos

I love thinking of different ways to get my classes writing and seeing themselves as writers and story tellers. I used the following method with Grade 6 and 7 this year, but in this post I will only talk about Grade 7.

I used the following process with Grade 7:

The elements of a good story

As always, our  lesson concentrated on the elements of a good story – characters, setting, a plot, a conflict, and a resolution to the project. We practised this in different ways orally in the lesson.

Tell the story from pictures

Some time ago I downloaded some wonderful Creative Commons stories from the African Storybook website https://www.africanstorybook.org/  . I removed the title and the words, but kept the art and details of the original stories as a Creative Commons requirement. I put the art on to PowerPoints and I numbered the stories. Each student in Grade 6 and 7 chose a number. Their task would be to turn the pictures into their own story and make sure they included the elements of a story. 

Create a video of your story using Screencastify

The Grade 7s then used the Chrome extension,  Screencastify, to narrate their stories and turn them into videos.  

Examples of the stories

1. Original: The Girl Who Could Fly by Ingrid Schechter. llustration - Ingrid Schechter and Amir Bachir António Necas. Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 Source: www.africanstorybook.org

Casseddie’s Big Surprise by Casbru

2. Original: A Hot Saturday by Nathi and David; Translation - Nathi and David; Illustration - Wiehan de Jager Language – English. Creative Commons: Attribution 3. Source www.africanstorybook.org

A Hot Saturday by Ethkau

The Hottest Saturday by Geolev

The Grade Ones had fun making Gingerbread houses using Google Sheets

The template is on the right, and the student's work on the left

I absolutely love using Google Classroom on our Chromebooks with the Grade Ones.  They find their way around so easily. They log into their Chromebooks, and find Google Classroom just like that.  

Today I wanted them to get acquainted with Google Sheets. All the instructions and templates can be found in their Google Classroom - each student gets their own copy of everything.  Our lesson was divided into three parts. 

1. First we learned about Google Sheets and practised drawing a staircase up and down to get familiar with colouring in cells. We also created other simple drawings.

2. After that we listened to the story of the Gingerbread Man on YouTube.  What I love about Google Classroom is that the students watch the video within Google Classroom and aren't distracted by noticing any other YouTube videos. 

 

3. Then I gave the instructions for the main lesson where they were provided with a template and had to replicate it exactly.  I also recorded my instructions on the online program https://online-voice-recorder.com/, downloaded it and attached it to Google Classroom so that the students could listen to it at any time if they needed to, 

4. The students then created their houses in Google Sheets and when they had finished they turned them in. I was easily able to look at each one and assess it later on, and I returned their work to them with an encouraging comment made with my Bitmoji Google Chrome Extension.  

A couple more examples

I have to say - I LOVE using Google classroom! 

Using Canva to create animated posters in Grade 4

Canva is a fantastic tool for learning. A picture is worth a 1000 words and my students are continually inspired by all the beautiful designs in Canva  I am using Canva in different ways  with my Grade 4 class of 9 and 10 year olds.  

In the lesson described below I wanted to get them familiar with animation so I thought we should make a poster. There are several ways to use animation in Canva, but I thought we would start with the simplest way – “Find an animated image and make it your own.”

The task

I asked my class to think about an important event that was coming up in their lives in the next week or two, find an animated image that they liked, and then change the image accordingly to make it a personal poster. One girl was going horse-riding and was very excited about this event. Two were attending birthday parties. One was getting a new puppy. And so the list continued... The class loved what they discovered in Canva.

Here are four examples of what the class came up with:

     

I am really hoping that I will be able to get the Canva for Education free account for teachers (Canva is available for free globally to all educational institutions and qualified teachers with proof of teaching certification). Then I will make use of some of these tips from the video below with my Grade 4 class in one of their upcoming lessons.

Create stories from selected images and publish them in Book Creator (Grade 6)

One of the things I love doing at school is getting my students to write stories in different ways. I want them to see themselves as writers, able to tell and write amazing stories that hold the attention of whoever is listening.

I used the following process with Grade 6.

The elements of a good story

Our story lesson concentrated on the elements of a good story – characters, setting, a plot, a conflict, and a resolution to the project. We practised this in different ways orally in the lesson.

Find the story in a selection of art

Some time ago I downloaded some wonderful Creative Commons stories from the African Storybook website. I removed the words, but kept the art and details of the original stories as a Creative Commons requirement. I put the art on to PowerPoints and I numbered the stories. Each student chose a number. Their task would be to turn the pictures into their own story and make sure they included the elements of a story. Here is an example. The following art was from a story from the African storybook website called ‘Bongsa and her landlord – best friends’ by Roth Odondi. The illustrator is Rob Owen. Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0. https://bit.ly/3EkaRgr 

                

Using Book Creator as a publishing tool

How would they present their stories? I felt that they should get to know the wonderful program Book Creator which is a free program.  I created a PowerPoint of instructions that they could follow and off we went into our storytelling adventure. The final step would be for them to narrate their stories in Book Creator. 

The result was very pleasing. Book Creator set the stories out neatly in a bookshelf. 

You can visit our Grade 6 library on this link, https://bit.ly/3gLYU8k , and read (and listen to) some of the stories. 

I love Book Creator

 I love Book Creator. You can do so much with it in a classroom.  The limited version is free for teachers and students to use. So awesome!

What is Book Creator?

Book Creator is a program one can use as an app in Google Chrome, in iOS on the iPad,  or as a browser app. Itois an amazing program that enables students to create and read multimodal digital books. They can do this so easiy and end up with an amazing digital resource. My students love it. They use it on their Chromebook browsers.  It is an ideal tool for enhancing student engagement through story creation and multimedia design. This YouTube video explains Book Creator so beautifully. 

 

What can you do with Book Creator?

So far I have used it with classes for presenting their stories and for presenting their projects. The results have been so inspiring. I will be showing examples in later blog posts. But there is so much more one can do with Book Creator at Primary school level. Take a look through this e-book. It gives ideas of what you can do with Book Creator in an elementary classroom.

Using Book Creator in the Elementary Classroom

Click to read this book, made with Book Creator

https://read.bookcreator.com

How do you use Book Creator?

Jen Jonson gives a really great tutorial on how to use Book Creator, so I am going to embed it here. 

Try it out! you'll fall in love with it, like I did!

The Grade 4s wrote and illustrated lovely stories using Google Slides

I wanted the class to practise their story-writing skills digitally. A great application for story-writing is Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint. We used Google Slides. The story templates came from the wonderful site: Communications4All:  
http://www.communication4all.co.uk/http/StoryMaker.htm

How did we go about the lesson? 

1. First we looked at the story map image also found on the Communication4All website http://bit.ly/2P9lU71. I wanted the students to be aware that a good story always has a problem in it that needs to be solved. 

2. Then I wrote a story called 'The Fairy and the Three Wishes' along with the class using one of the templates from the  Communication4All website.  We followed the steps of the Story Map. This was to show the class how it was done,  and to let them see the finished example. We read through this story together. 

The Fairy and the Three Wishes by Fiobea

   

 3. The students then chose our individual stories from the Communication4All website. The students wrote their stories and illustrated them. They turned them in using Google Classroom so that I could take a look at them.

Here are some of the finished examples 

 Kalben ‘The Pirates of the Ocean’

   

The Superhero Who Saved The Day by Lilnas

  

The Three Pirates by Isasim

'Technology Ideas for the Classroom #1' via Wakelet

CC BY 4 -Bing Images

I'm so excited about all the things that you can do with Wakelet. Not only is it a great curating tool, but it has 101 other uses. In this post I am using it as a curating tool. I thought that I would pass on some ideas geared to our staff at school every week to, hopefully, inspire them as they prepare their lessons. So here is my first attempt at embedding a Wakelet - Technology Ideas for the Classroom  - Term 3 week 1.