Third grade teachers spent a fun and festive week playing Holiday Minute to Win It! games to practice skills in measurement and graphing. In the “Face the Cookie” challenge, students had to get a gingerbread cookie from their forehead to their mouth without using their hands. They timed each other and then created bar graphs to display their data using the Numbers app on their iPads. Other games included the “Reindeer Nose Dive,” “Do You Hear What I Hear,” and “Holiday Card Cliffhanger.” What a fun way to practice math skills and practice working together in the classroom!
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Several weeks ago, Nicole David sent me an email with a link to the information for The Hour of Code, an event scheduled in conjunction with Computer Science Education Week, December 9-15. Educators were encouraged to sign their students up to participate for one hour that week by accessing a website containing motivational videos and grade level appropriate coding activities. The purpose of this event was, according to the website, that the event be "the first step on a journey to learn more about how technology works and how to create software applications". I have to admit that I was dubious at first. First Graders coding? How could that work? However, Nicole had done ALL of the background work and in no time at all, we were both on board and eagerly awaiting the experience of spending an hour with a room full of First Graders learning to code on an iPad. Today was our day and it was an amazing amount of fun. We "Chirped" out the website to the students, Nicole walked them through the first round of the coding activity (Angry Birds!) that she had chosen for them and they were off! Thanks so much, Nicole, for bringing this event to my attention and for letting me be a part of it! Mrs. Simmons's and Mrs. Harrison's classes learned about fables before the Thanksgiving holiday. The activity began with the reading of the fable which the teachers put into eBackpack. Once the story was read, the students filled out a story map and determined what the moral of their fable was. They then used Puppet Pals to create a story of their own making with the same moral as the story that they had read. Two of our 5th Graders came to my office today to give me a brief overview of the process. |
Debbie Smith
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