In celebration of winter, the students are going to design their own intricate snowflakes using a free online tool. This is reminiscent of cutting out snowflakes from folded paper. This activity works on fine motor and mouse skills. It is always one of the favorite computer activities! They are writing snowflake poems in the classroom to accompany their snowflakes.
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Today the students located and opened the document they saved in their personal folder last week, made more changes, and practiced saving those changes. Below is an example of one student's work:
This week we will continue our discussion of the File System, and practice opening up a file saved in their folder, making changes to it, and then using "save" and "save as." Each student will have a picture of a snowflake from Pixie saved in a file in their folder, and they will create text blocks to add descriptive adjectives and verbs around the snowflake, and experiment with various ways to change the appearance of the text such as font type, size, color, and selecting bold, italics, underline and other options before they save their work.
This week the students are learning about the computer file system. We will start the class off by discussing how they save their work papers. Then we will talk about how computers store information using storage devices such as a hard drive. We will discuss the importance of organizing things and how confusing it would be if they just threw all their papers into the bottom of a backpack. The same thing is true for the computer. You need to store the files in an organized way to make it easy to find it again. We will use a small “paper filing cabinet" and explain that the computer uses a similar system. This visual aid has folders for each grade and then inside the second grade folder there is a folder for each student. We will discuss how computers folders are set up the same way. We will also discuss when to use “save” and “save as” as well as the importance of saving things in their “personal folders” instead of on the computer they are using, and how the Network Server works in our school.
Today the students will use their computer time to do interactive activities on the Jan Brett website. This will enhance the study of Jan Brett that they are currently doing in their classroom.
Kerpoof Spell-a-Picture is a fun way to practice nouns and verbs. The students will access Kerpoof, click on Spell-a-Picture, select a scene, and then spell some nouns. In the woodlands example below, I spelled bird, monkey, deer, squirrel, flower and bear. Once I had some "nouns" in my scene, I tried some verbs like: dance, jiggle, laugh, hit, and fly. It's fun to watch what happens! Click on the image below to get started.
Today the students will explore the educational and interactive Free Time apps connected to the 2nd grade technology blog. I will work with them on the concept of web browser "tabs". Each time they click on an activity, it creates a new tab. We'll switch from one tab to another and learn to close them when we're done. Students are free to continue exploration of these sites from home.
Today students will continue reinforcing math concepts from their math curriculum by using the Investigation in Math Shapes program in Puzzles. Students must select appropriate shapes and manipulate them correctly to fill in a picture outline.
Today the second group of students will go to the computer lab to recreate a monster that they have never seen by using a written description. This will complete the Monster Adjective Project! Watch for the results in the Gallery.
Today the first group of students will come to the computer lab and use an adjective-filled written description assigned to them to recreate on Pixie a monster that they have never seen.
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GalleryClick here to see the 2nd Grade projects: Archives
June 2014
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Photo used under Creative Commons from gunder