Lionel’s Tall Tales
Use this interactive website to explore sentences. Each one has a who, what, where, when and why. Mix them up for some silliness. http://pbskids.org/cgi-registry/lions/cor-tales.pl/click
Presidential Bio-Cube
ReadWriteThink has an excellent lesson plan and tool that can be adapted. Students research a President or First Lady and use their research to create a foldable cube.
Visit www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=928 for the lesson plan and http://readwritethink.org/materials/bio_cube/ for the Bio-Cube maker.
Build Your Wild Self
What child hasn’t pretended to be an animal? Give kids a chance to build a wild version of themselves using this site from the New York Zoos and Aquarium: www.buildyourwildself.com.
Extend this activity by having students write a story about their alter ego.
Best Day Ever Comic
Third and forth grade students created comics about their best day ever using KidPix and Comic Life.
Equipment needed: computer and color printer
Software needed: drawing software and Comic Life
1. Students brainstorm their best day ever. Who was there? Where were you? What were you doing?
2. Students use drawing software to illustrate their best day ever. Students could also illustrate this by hand and their drawing could be scanned to make it an electronic image.
3. Demonstrate exporting a drawing and dragging it into iPhoto.
4. Students export their drawing as a jpeg image and import it into iPhoto.
5. Demonstrate Comic Life, how to open it, set up a page, drag in an image, add speech bubbles and fancy lettering.
6. Students open Comic Life, drag in their illustration, and add speech bubbles and fancy lettering.
7. Print and display!
Animating the life cycle of a plant
Second grade students study plants at our school. As a culminating activity they create a KidPix animation demonstrating their knowledge of how a plant starts as a seed, grows and flowers. The same process could yield an animation about trees.
Equipment needed: computer, color printer (optional) and projector
Software needed: drawing software such as KidPix or drawing software and presentation software (Keynote or PowerPoint)
1. Outline criteria for the animation.
2. Demonstrate “building” on a drawing. Start with a picture of the ground and sky and save as “plant 1.” Add a seed and save as “plant 2.” Continue in this fashion for a few more slides, asking students what else they need to add and saving in the same fashion.
3. Students begin working on their own pictures, building on each slide.
4. When all students have finished their slides, demonstrate putting them together into a slide show. Demonstrate changing the timing and the transitions between slides. For an animation, you want no transitions.
5. Assist students as they develop their slide shows and turn them into animations.
6. Print slide shows as a comic and allow students to cut and reassemble them to make a flip book.
8. Slide shows can be exported in the form of a QuickTime movie to be shared online or on a DVD.
