colAR mix app

My class has been fascinated with the Aurasma app where we can make images come alive.  So when I learned that the colAR Mix app had some free seasonal coloring pages for the holidays, I decided to try out this app with my first graders.

It was a huge hit!  We will be trying out their New Year's pages in January.  I downloaded the free coloring pages here.

Rudolph Stories in Book Creator

This past week at school we had many festive activities as we approached Christmas break.  On our reindeer day we read several fiction and nonfiction reindeer books. 

 

Then we began to create our own reindeer stories to publish in the Book Creator app on the iPads.  We have the free version of the Book Creator app.  It allows you to create one book at a time.

First we used a graphic organizer to plan each page of our story.

This was our first time using the book creator app.  The students caught on to the tools within the app very quickly.

The students found it very easy to use the drawing tools within the app to add details to their pictures.

They were thrilled to make a cover for their stories.

When the books were complete, we exported them to the Explain Everything app.  In this app, the students recorded themselves reading each page of their stories.  We then saved this project as a video to the camera roll so we could upload them to our Kidblogs.

Here are a few of the finished stories. They are very simple stories since this was our first time using the app.  I'm hoping our next books will contain more details.

 

 

Augmented Letters to Santa

We wrote and typed letters to Santa for our local newspaper.  The students were very excited about the chance to be published in the real newspaper!  We wrote the letters first in class, and then we took them to the computer lab to type for the paper.

I always love reading their Santa letters.  They have the best reasons for how they have earned the new toys.

We then took a picture of our handwritten letters and uploaded them to our Kidblogs.  I wanted to use the Aurasma app to augment our letters to Santa.  I had my service learning student from the high school video each child reading his or her letter.  I was hoping to use each student's letter as the trigger image for his/her video.  I had thought that the handwriting and borders being different would be enough to keep each student video with the correct letter.  It wasn't!  So I took a photo of each student and attached the pictures to the letters.  Then I linked each video to the student's photo.  Now when we scan the photos in the Aurasma app it pulls up the video of each child reading his or her letter to Santa.

Fact Families on the iPads

We have been learning about fact families in math. For one of our fact family activities, I had the students represent a fact family on the iPads.  Each of my students had a different set of numbers to use for his/her fact family. I allowed the students to choose their own math manipulatives to use for this project.  Some chose to use our 2 colored dots and some chose to use our linking cubes.  I also had the students choose between the Popplet app or the Pic Collage app to show their final products. Below are some of the finished products.