Some of the kids in my class have played around with Stagecast which allows them to make their own video game. I have the software at school from when I used to teach it, but it is not a free program (except for the demo version). If kids want to use a similar free program they can download Scratch. It was designed for kids at MIT. Scratch allows you to make animations, games, and other multi-media interactive creations. Here are some tutorials for learning how to use Scratch. Why play video games when you can make your own? This may take some work, but you will learn a lot!
Today, the fourth graders at New Searles Elementary School had weatherman Jeremy Reiner, from WHDH-TV channel 7 in Boston visit to tell us everything there is to know about weather. He usually is on the evening news, but today he will be delivering the weather news from 4:00-6:30.
The class has certainly enjoyed the two Brian Selznick books "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" and "Wonderstruck". Since reading the books last fall, different students keep checking out the books to reread them every time we go to the library. I wrote up a Donors Choose project to get 5 classroom copies of each book. You can find the project here. The Nashua Board of Education.is paying for one-half of the project. If you would like to donate any sum, through March 19 your donation will be matched by Donors Choose if you include the the match code BLOOM.
• Donors must enter BLOOM during check-out where it says "Match or gift code" - and voila! The donation is automatically doubled. See where donors must enter the code.
During Valentine's week, the class read an old Chinese poem called "Shang Ya". It is an Oath of Friendship written 2000 years ago. We used the poem as an inspiration to write our own oaths of friendship. We also used charcoal, water color paints, and markers to create our own style of Chinese art on which to write our poems. Here is an animoto video of the process and finished results.
Here is an Animoto video of our visit to the State House in Concord. Unfortunately my class was broken up into two groups so that I only got photos of some of my students.
So you send your kid to college and hope that he grows up, but then you find out that he still likes playing around with his old toys. Here is a video my son Andrew made for a Gordon College video competition last week. See kids, college isn't all just about studying! Actually, what I think really happened is that he found a clever way to get his roommate to do his laundry for him. Fans of Toy Story will enjoy this.
You can a view a post a made a couple of years ago on my blog Simply Teaching about the great baseball player Lou Gehrig and an Ironman triathlete who called himself Blazeman. It gives a lot of background information on this weeks story, "The Luckiest Man" and some embedded videos that we watched parts of in class. I really enjoy these inspiring stories and I hope that you take a look. These stories are even more poignant to me this year as I just learned that one of my high school classmates recently died from ALS.
Here is an updated and edited version of the youtube video we saw in class on John Blais, ALS, and the Ironman triathlon.
Here is one: of John Blais' poems (watch the video on John Blais and you will get it):
Live…more than your neighbors.
Unleash yourself upon the world and go places.
Go now.
Giggle…no…laugh…no…
Stay out past dark and bark at the moon like the wild dog that you are.
Understand that this is not a dress rehearsal.
This is it…your life.
FACE YOUR FEARS AND LIVE YOUR DREAMS.
Take it all in.
Yes, every chance you get…come close.
And, by all means, whatever you do…get it on film.
Just a reminder that you can find examples of how to do the Everyday Math algorithms online. This week we are reviewing the Partial -Quotient division algoryithm You can find many animations of the Partial Quotients Method here.
Here are three games and some extra reading to practice the vocabulary for our Houghton Mifflin Electricy and Magnetsim Unit. These are words you will need to know for the upcoming unit test. So be smart and have fun reviewing!
This week we will be reading about Komodo dragons. Today we learned how to follow directions in order to draw a fantastic dragon. For those who want to try this at home, you can find the directions and tutorial here.
This is our second successful attempt at creating digital poetry. Again we used a William Carlos Williams Poem as our inspiration. This time we used "The Red Wheelbarrow". After writing the poems, we read the wonderful book "Love that Dog" together. This book shows the interactions between a teacher and a student as a boy, Jack, is inspired to write poetry based on famous poems. Of course, one of the pivotal poems in the book is "The Red Wheelbarrow". We also wrote a class poem together, which came out fantastic. Lillian produced the video for the class poem.
Here is an Animoto I made last year for the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow". This post from my Mount Pleasant School days tells about the digital poetry project based on "The Red Wheelbarrow" and shows some of my fourth grader's poems. Here are poems that last year's fifth grade class wrote.
The first video is for a poem the class wrote together to model the steps in writing a poem. I wanted them to make the last stanza a prepositional phrase, but they also came up with some alliteration along the way. I really like the poem they wrote together. The rest of the poems the student's wrote were just as enjoyable. This was the first time the class got to use the digital camera and "Love that Dog" books funded from two different Donors Choose projects.
McGraw-Hill Education, publishers of our Everyday Math program, are offering five Everyday Math Apps for FREE on Novemebr 7-11, 2011. Go here or to the iTunes App store. If you have one of these devices, it would be great to get these apps for free and turn off Angry Birds for just a bit!
Here are three games to practice the vocabulary for our Houghton Mifflin Energy and Motion Unit. Some of the words we have been introduced to already. Others are from future lessons, but why not review and get ahead when you are looking for something to do. These are the words you will need to know for the unit test.
I played this song for the class last month and some of them really liked it and asked if they could hear it again. I am posting it on the class blog so that they can listen or even download it for free. C'mon it is better than Justin Beiber! Well, I am proud too, because Andrew Hansen is my son and this is his song. You can listen to "Creaking Door" here.
Andrew is a student at Gordon College in Massachusetts. For an internship this summer, he worked at Regenerate Music Studio in Tennessee and had a blast. There are three take aways for the class: 1) find a passion and explore it (2) college is not just about work-you can pursue your passion while you are there and (3) Andrew is pretty good at this stuff. Andrew is self taught at the guitar, singing, and writing music. "Creaking Door" is a song Andrew wrote, recorded and produced, as well as doing all the singing and the guitars. He did have some studio friends add the bass and drums.
Besides enjoying the song and being proud of Andrew, it does make you feel old when your own son sings nostagically about wishing he was younger.
We have begun making our first digital poems. We are exploring words and how they relate to each other through the model of William Carlos Williams poem "The Locust Tree in Flower". the words in the poem don't seem to relate to each other as in a sentence or even through the phrasing of a typical poem, but when you read the poem through a few times, one can see how they all fit together. I liken the poem to words written on puzzle pieces, mixed up and then randomly placed into the poem, with some words missing. We used the trees in front of New Searles School on a crisp and beautiful fall day to inspire the words we wrote. Then we mixed up the words like puzzle pieces to create our own poems following the "rules" that William Carlos Williams used: a title, 13 words, one word per line, 4 stanzas of 3 words, and a final word at the end.
I then introduced the class to Animoto and we learned to upload the pictures, write out the poem, and arrange it with music, so that we could share the poem online. As you can see they came out fantastic. You can find out more about this lesson on my teaching blog and this blog.
