3rd Grade “Zooms” In on Systems

Today’s blog post is brought to you by our author, Luke, and our photographer, Jordan. In addition to “Re-zoom” the students worked on making a green screen video about some of the animals we are helping this year at Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation, watched a Powers of 10 video, and started our next systems thinking book, Billibonk and the Big Itch.

Hi! This is Luke, and I am bringing you today`s blog post. Today, in 3rd grade G.T., we read a book. It was called Re-zoom. In the book, we looked at a picture and on the next page it zoomed out. After that, we watched a video on “things that are not what they seem to be.” Then, we made a re-zoom book on paper and shared them with the class. At the end of G.T. our class took home all of our papers from the year. I hope you enjoyed my post for today! Have an awesome week!

Cardboard Arcade Videos

mainevent

 

We have 2 videos so far to advertise our Cardboard Arcade for Wednesday night! The first one was created by Jordan G. in 5th grade.  The 2nd one is a compilation of pics and videos taken of the student during the construction process.  Enjoy!

The Kid Should See This

The Kid Should See This

For this week’s blog update, I thought I would share with you an awesome website that is a collection of videos a mother has curated to “connect kids, parents, and teachers with smart, conversation-starting videos – about science, art, music, nature, and more – that probably weren’t made for kids, but are still perfect for them.”  “The Kid Should See This” recently got updated, and I love the new look along with options for finding videos.  If you are looking for an educational website for your curious child, this is definitely one to bookmark!

Also, I want to congratulate our two winners from last week’s “Make a Theme Park Ride” contest for our online Edmodo class: Anna for “The Sparking Spur”, and Athasi for “Kittyana Jones.”  You can see the blog post I did about our winners here.  Next week, I will announce the winners of our Theme Park Mascot contest!

5th Grade Character Floor Plans

Floor Plan

The 5th graders created Character Floor plans, and chose either Thinglink or a video creation tool on the iPads to explain their designs.  If the student created a video, I have linked it to Aurasma so that the floor plan can be scanned at home in order to see the video.  I have included links to their explanations below:

Anna (also linked in Aurasma)

Connor

Cooper

Harrison

Kris

Lainey

Lexi

Paige (also linked in Aurasma)

5th Grade Considers “The Big Idea” of GT

This blog post is brought to you by Aubrie.  We will have one more blog post (hopefully later this week) sharing the Thinglinks and videos students created for their Character Trait Floorplans.)

Today was our last day in G.T., and we were very busy doing an array of activities.

We created slideshows about the meaning of G.T. using quotes we found on Pinterest, and presented them to the class. We were also able to add music and pictures.

We connected to a new group on Edmodo that is just for 5th graders that are going to middle school. This way, we can still talk about G.T. and other related topics.

Mrs. Eichholz got a sphero with the great big check she got for being an *amazing* teacher, and we all got a packet of papers about how to use the sphero. We had to complete a challenging challenge with with the sphero: programming it to follow our instructions. If we correctly programmed it, we got to do Maker’s Studio.

We also did our report card self-assesments, where we rate ourselves on various things, like working well with others.

Lastly, we watched two videos, *(attached below)* one about Kid President and another one about kindness.

Have a great summer!

 

A Pep Talk from Kid President to You – YouTube

Life Vest Inside – Kindness Boomerang – “One Day” – YouTube

 

 




1st Grade Sings About Their Year

Today was our last day of 1st grade GT.  I asked the students to try something different, and I was proud of how they met the challenge!  Their task was to rewrite the lyrics of a familiar song to reflect on our year.  This was an idea that I got from one of my favorite 1st grade GT teachers, Joelle Trayers.  Last week, the  students did some great reflections using our class blog as a reference, so they were able to look at those while writing their songs.

One group wrote their song to the tune of “Old McDonald Had a Farm.”  Another group used “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”  And the final group used “Happy.”  They only had about 40 minutes to choose a song and write their lyrics before I asked them to perform, so it was just a quick activity to get them to think one last time about what we have done this year.

None of the groups wanted to be recorded performing their songs, so I just took still pictures.  However, one student wanted a recording of her song, so I have included her video below.  I also included the rest of the Tellagami videos from class.  (Instructions will be coming with GT folders and report cards next week for scanning your child’s Photo Mapo to view the videos.)

With the little time we had left, the students were able to choose to play one of their favorite games/activities of the year: Robot Turtles, the interactive iPad game Osmo, or logic puzzles (Perplexers).

It was a great final class, and I look forward to seeing all of the students in 2nd grade next year!






5th Grade Learns About Grover Cleveland and Lego Stop Motion

This post is brought to you by Aubrie.  

In G.T. today we were able to do Genius Hour, and Aubrie (That’s me) presented a project about Grover Cleveland. I traced him back to 1540, and made it into a game. Alex and Kenneth also presented their project about Lego Stopmotion, which is where you take a lot of pictures of one thing moving, and you put it together to make a video. They made a scavenger hunt to look for pieces of paper with Lego facts on it and made a quiz about it. They also made a Lego Stopmotion video and presented it.

We watched 3 videos as well *(attached below!)*, and talked about the meanings. (Although, 2 aren’t on here).

Lastly, I bring you bad news: *Only 2 more G.T. classes left!!*

 

See you next week!

Careful canine reaches for ball – YouTube

Axtell Park Awesomeness

The Time You Have in Jellybeans

1st Grade Works on Tellagami

The 1st graders are wrapping up their research projects by creating short videos using the Tellagami app.  This app allows them to choose an avatar and use a picture of the country they are researching in the background.  They can then choose to type a script and have their character narrate (with several voices and accents to choose from) or they can record themselves speaking.  Almost all of them are done, and we hope to share the finished products next week!  In the meantime, here are some pics of a couple of the videos.

alps meteora