Fifty nifty United States

With the fourth of July quickly upon us, I thought it would be a good time to take a look back at our 50 states project. Hopefully, the summer will bring lots of great adventures for everybody in our nation! Every year third graders study states. On Arch Day, our last day of school celebration, they proudly sing Fifty nifty United States. In library class we use enchanted learning.com to research our states. Then we share our findings on Google presentation. It's a good way to introduce our third graders to another of the Google apps. As a teacher you really just have to show the kids a couple of things and then they take over, making the presentation their own by exploring many features of Google presentation. This year I was very excited to show them the research tool where they could search for an image about their state and get their citation. It made teaching them about the importance of citing your sources easy because they just dragged their image and the citation came with it! Take a look at their work.
Ms. Reardon's class Ms. Matrisciano's class

What did the fifth graders love most about their six year Williams School library experience?

Padlet is a useful web tool to use with students for a quick formative assessment. Our fifth graders were asked to think about what they learned and loved most at the Williams School library. All they had to do was click on the link from the library webpage and put their thoughts on our library padlet wall. Not only could they record their own thoughts, but they get to see what their classmates thought and stir up memories from their K-5 years in the library. Some loved learning about the Dewey Decimal System, many loved the Digital Passport program we used in the fifth grade year, and some went all the way back to kindergarten folktale unit. Padlet is quick, easy, paperless, allows you to share everybody's thoughts and gathers useful anecdotal data for the teacher. Here is our Fifth grade Padlet wall.

Summer Reading opportunities

This summer I am very excited about my students' ability to access ebooks and many other great resources from our library catalog homepage at home. This means they can enjoy reading titles from the Williams School Library all year long!! You may need passwords for some of these titles within the catalog, but if you are a Williams parent you have received that information in your weekly update from Ayesha. Our summer reading lists are also available here and lots of other great resources on the web. Here's how to get there.

2014 Book Trailers by Grade 5

Check out this year's book trailers created by Grade 5 students using imovie and Google Docs. The students collaborated to create trailers of their book group reading titles. Teachers also collaborated on this. Mr. Lavigne, Mr. Garlick, and Ms. Kosmo created the lesson, but the kids did all the work! We are really pleased with how they turned out.

Fifth graders get creative with idioms using ABCYA's animate

Sometimes at the end of year it is difficult to keep the fifth graders engaged in their lessons, but they are eager when they can use a cool tool to demonstrate their learning. It is also great for us teachers, because we can have some fun with the kids and still teach them something in the waning days of the school year. We used two cool tools, Brainpop and Animate from ABCYA.com to create a motivating learning experience. You can view the animations by going to ABCYA.com and then opening animate. Just drag one of our animations into the frame and click the play arrow and have some fun with idioms!

Learning our letters with Skitch

Skitch is an app that we have used this year to create Internet Safety posters with grade 4. It is a versatile app that can also be used successfully with our youngest learners. Kindergartners practiced identifying their upper and lower case letters and typing their names using Skitch. Some of them even did a little drawing. Check them out! It's quick, fun, and easy to share.

Explain Everything: An app for all subjects!

Another great app that we have been using this year is Explain Everything. It allows student to create, collaborate and share with a global audience. You can insert images, choose themes, free draw, and record on your slides to create an appealing presentation. Our math coach, Jesse Winch, has been using it with his students to help them show and explain their work. This app brings learning to life in all subject areas! Our fourth grade students researched the Underground Railroad using Scholastic.com. Then they took their information and created presentations using Explain Everything. Have a look at their presentations here. While you are at it take a peek at how Mr. Winch has used this app.