March 18th was South Carolina Day, in honor of John C. Calhoun's birthday. In all classrooms across the state, students learned about South Carolina.
In one third grade classroom, the students independently researched South Carolina on the CultureGrams website during the reading lesson. The teacher had posted the link in Edmodo and the students accessed the South Carolina page from the States Edition section of the website with his/her iPad.
Then during writing, the students used his or her research to create a digital project about South Carolina. The students were to showcase five facts about South Carolina for the second graders in either Book Creator or Explain Everything.
In a second grade classroom, the class read the book P is for Palmetto for the interactive read aloud for the day. Then students created a Popplet with pictures and sentences about different SC symbols. The students posted his or her Popplet to the class Padlet wall. The teacher had created a QR code to help students access the padlet site. Then they shared their Popplets with the class from the Promethean Board.
We have been working on the Common Core State Standard 1.NBT.A.1 - Count to 120, starting at any number less than 120. In this range, read and write numerals and represent a number of objects with a written numeral. I decided to have the students create and count their own groups of objects between 1-120 on the iPads. I let the students pick different manipulatives to use for this project such as blocks, links, counters, buttons, etc from my math manipulatives in the classroom. The students counted out four different groups of objects and took a photo of their groups with the iPad camera. Some of my students chose to use the Popplet app and some of them choose to use the Pic Collage app to showcase their different groups. Here are some of their finished products.
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.
We have been working on subtraction in math. We have been using lots of pictures, manipulatives, and equations to solve these simple subtraction problems. Since our addition Popplet had gone so well, I thought we might try creating a subtraction Popplet.
We began our activity in the Skitch app. Skitch is a free app that allows you to take a photo and then write on it. I've seen this app used a lot for labeling things, but I thought it would be perfect for showing subtraction because it would allow us to mark out the number of items we were subtracting.
I had my students select a number and get that many blocks. Then they took a picture of
their blocks in the skitch app. The students used the tools in the skitch app to mark out blocks to represent a subtraction equation. I had them show all the ways to subtract from that number with their pictures. The students saved each picture to their camera roll. Then the students imported their pictures in the Popplet app and wrote the corresponding subtraction equations. Here are a couple of the finished products.
We have been working on simple addition within 10. We worked on using many manipulatives and strategies to solve problems and write addition equations. We also worked on finding all the ways to make a certain sum.
I decided to have the students use the Popplet app on the iPads to demonstrate their learning. The students selected a sum between 5 and 10. Then they used the camera to take photos of the 2-colored dots to show all the ways to make that sum. My students saved their photos to the camera roll and then imported them into their popplets. We also worked on trying to type in the equations to match our dots. Here is how a few of them turned out.
