Happy Earth Day!

My class made Earth Day posters and then wrote paragraphs about their posters. I then had each child take a picture of their poster with the digital camera. I imported the pictures into Photo Story and then recorded the children reading their paragraphs.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

Here is great video for Earth Day from BrainPop Jr. Simply click here to see the video: tp://bit.ly/aI7ZCn

Math Facts

Have you heard of Audacity? It is a free download available from: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ I used this program to record podcasts of the weekly addition and subtraction facts for my second graders. After recording, I exported the files into MPEG files and put them on my web page. My students can go to my school web page and practice their math facts with me when they are at home studying for the weekly quiz. One parent even told me that her son downloaded these weekly podcasts onto his iPod!

Social Studies-interactive study guide

I created this Power Point presentation to help my second grade students prepare for their upcoming Social Studies test. They are shown the word and an image to illustrate the word. There is also a sound button that they can choose to click on to hear the word read to them. After taking the time to think about the word, the children click again to see, and hear if they choose, the definition of the word. (I converted my slide show to a Windows Media file so that I could post it here to share with you.)

Wordle Activity

My students recently completed a fun activity using Wordle. (http://www.wordle.net/) Each child had a partner and wrote a nice paragraph about their partner: what they were good at, what they liked to do, why they were a good friend, etc. Then each child typed the paragraph that they wrote about their partner using a program called Max Write. The paragraphs were saved and then later imported into Wordle. Below is an example of what we did:

Knitting

I am an avid knitter and my class this year has really taken an interest in learning how to knit. I have now taught 20 of my 26 second grade students how to knit. Here is a great web site that I sent home in my weekly newsletter that has wonderful video tutorials reviewing basic knitting skills: http://www.bevscountrycottage.com/teach-knit.html