Tag Archives: dance mat typing

Computer Lab News 2nd Grade: Weeks 30 – End of Year

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For Earth Day, 2nd Grade discussed why they love the earth and things that we can do to help the earth. Each student then created original artwork using KidPix and these were added to the PlanetFesto ribbon along with their ideas of what they could do to help the earth. After this was completed, 2nd Grade used the PBS site, Eeko World which is designed to help children between the ages of 6 and 9 learn about the important role they can play in taking care of the earth.

The students continued to work on their typing skills using the Dance Mat Typing site. They will continue to use this site in 3rd Grade. 2nd Grade also practiced their Money Skills on various web sites, created a Mother’s Day Wordle which I hope made it home, practiced writing paragraphs in Word and played a variety of educational games to end the year including trying out Jumpstart 3rd Grade!

Next year, these students will participate in the Monster Project as well as continuing to learn about Internet Safety, Microsoft Office Products and Keyboarding.

Computer Lab News: Weeks 21-29 – 2nd Grade

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February once again brought Winter Wonderland activities for 2nd Grade. They created and recorded a Virtual Valentine and completed a Things I Love activity. The Things I Love activity gave 2nd Grade the opportunity to reinforce searching for and adding clipart to PowerPoint presentations and they also learned how to narrate a slide. All of the completed Winter Wonderland activities are shared on their Winter Wonderland page. If you haven’t seen these, you really should take a minute to check them out.

One of the activities that all classes were encouraged to do in March was World Math Day. This is an annual event with students from around the world competing against one another in mental math games to try to set a world record for the most correct math answers in a 2 day period – 2 days because the event ran during the time that it was March 4, 2009 anywhere in the world. 2nd Grade was not in the computer lab either day we could have competed at school but they practiced in the lab and were encouraged to try to participate at home. Two of the students actually did and added 383 correct math answers to the world record. Here are just a few statistics from World Math Day:

  • 204 Countries represented
  • 12,647 Cities/Towns participating
  • 38,058 Schools participating
  • 1,952,879 Students participating
  • 452,682,682 Questions correctly answered

2nd Grade worked on their keyboarding skills by completing Level 1 of Dance Mat Typing. They also wrote and illustrated a short story about what would happen or what they would do if they found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. For this story, they used Wordpad and drew the illustration using the built in drawing tools in Wordpad. These have been printed and sent home. I hope you had an opportunity to see them. 2nd Grade also spent time using the educational program, Jumpstart 2nd Grade.