Computer Lab News 1st Grade: Weeks 30 – End of Year

First, Kindergarten & 1st Grade’s Easter pictures have been put in to a slideshow for your enjoyment:

1st Grade was busy at the end of the year finishing up their Adventures In Keyboarding project. These were printed as mini-books and I hope that you had an opportunity to see them. All of the students did a great job using the keyboard to type in all of the words themselves.

For Earth Day, 1st Grade discussed things that we can do to help the earth and then drew a picture in KidPix to show why they love the earth:

1st Grade also were measured again for the How Tall is a 1st Grader project, drew a picture to illustrate comparative heights and played some measurement related online games. Check out our How Tall page to see how much our 1st Graders grew and to watch a slideshow of pictures drawn by the 1st Grade to show comparative heights.

Did you receive your Mother’s Day card? 1st Grade created these using Kerpoof Studio which can be used at home too.

The computer lab partnered up with the 1st Grade art program to help colorize pictures that each 1st grade student had taken. Using a program called, PhotoFiltre, each student colored their close up image 4 times. These were then printed by the mom doing the art program and put on to canvas. I was lucky enough to get one as a gift from the 1st grade. I hope you loved yours as much as I love mine!

1st Grade 2009 Photography Art Project

As if that’s not enough, 1st Grade also spent time on various web sites playing educational games and even had a chance to try out Jumpstart 2nd Grade!

Computer Lab News: Weeks 21-29 – 1st Grade

1st Grade began their work in the lab in February by finishing their Penguin Math Books. These and the completed Penguin Glyphs will be shared on their page on the Winter Wonderland Wiki very soon. For Valentine’s Day, 2nd Grade did some graphing of Valentine’s hearts in Excel. We visited the Necco web site to learn how Conversation Hearts are made. Each student then got a box of Conversation Hearts which they grouped by color and counted. Then each student entered their numbers in the Excel spreadsheet found on the Activities page to create their graph. All of the results were combined on to a single spreadsheet and you can see the results on the 1st Grade Winter Wonderland Wiki page.

Much of the rest of February and March concentrated on keyboarding with the continued Adventures in Keyboarding focusing on letters “H” through “P”. In addition to this, 1st Grade also played the following keyboarding games which they can play online at home too:

March also brought World Math Day which is an International 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. 1st Grade participated in this event on March 5th and helped add 953 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

In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, 1st Grade did a project about rainbows. They first watched an online book about how rainbows are formed and then each 1st Grader created Rainbow Alphabets in Microsoft Excel. This helped them to learn about rows, columns and cells and a little bit about formatting in Excel. The Rainbow Alphabets have been printed and sent home.

To celebrate Easter, 1st Grade first brainstormed ideas about Easter and we used an online tool called Wordle to create a picture of their ideas:

Wordle: 1st Grade Easter

After creating the Wordle, each 1st grader then drew an Easter picture in KidPix. These will be shared online soon.

In addition to everything else, 1st Grade also worked in Jumpstart 1st Grade this month.

Computer Lab News: Weeks 21-29 – Kindergarten

Kindergarten has had a busy February and March in the Computer Lab. They continued with their Adventures in Keyboarding focusing on words starting with the letters “H” through “O”.

We have been trying to work on things in the lab that correlate with the Kindergarten curriculum. February started off with lessons about the ocean and all of the Kindergarten students drawing pictures of the ocean in KidPix. These were on display in the lab at Open House and have been sent home with your students. They all did a terrific job drawing their ocean floor and the ocean and adding habitat animals. After our ocean adventures, we moved on to learning more about dinosaurs by putting dinosaurs in order by size and then drawing our very own dinosaur picture using Drawing For Children. This is a free drawing program for children that you could download and use at home if you have a PC at home. After drawing their dinosaur pictures, each student completed a Dinosaur Book in Powerpoint that worked on some math concepts as well as starting to teach them how to add clipart and images to Powerpoint presentations. The finished Dinosaur Books will be printed and sent home after Easter break and will also be shared online.

The dinosaur activities took us in to March where we talked about the life cycle of butterflies and created our own butterfly life cycle picture on a website called Kerpoof. We have special student logins for this at school but your student can play on this at home too. You can join for a fee or just use the tools without joining for free! The butterfly life cycle pictures have been sent home. I hope that you had a chance to look at them.

In the last class before Easter break, each Kindergarten student drew an Easter picture in KidPix. These will be shared online.

In addition to all the rest, Kindergarten also used the educational software program Sammy’s Science House and worked on their literacy skills at Starfall and played and learned about the life in the Great North and the Inuit people at Wumpa’s World.