Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Tag: first grade

Communicating Understanding and Documenting Student Learning

screencast

Our First and Second Graders recently completed projects using ScreenChomp to create screencasts on their iPads. The learning goal for the students was to reflect to communicate their responses to the essential questions from the units of inquiry they were completing. A big challenge was representing their thinking about their learning visually and communicating their answers to the questions in their second language (French, Spanish, or Dutch).

The First Graders responded to the following questions from the People Around the World unit.

  • What is my daily life like?
  • How is my life similar to the lives of children in other countries?
  • How is my life different from the lives of children in other countries?

The Second Graders responded to the following questions from the Weather unit.

  • What is the weather?
  • What makes the weather change?
  • How does weather affect people’s lives?

Here is an example of one student’s screencast.

Alphabet, Art, Teeth and Technology

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 Our first-grade teachers, Sally Laha and Laura Carew, recently taught a very interesting unit. The objective was to help the students learn about good dental health while applying their knowledge of the alphabet. The assessment included image creation and application by writing a sentence using their dental knowledge with their assigned alphabet letter.

Technology was used when the students drew images and wrote their sentences in Windows Journal on tablet computers. The teachers printed each Journal page to create their alphabet book. A digital version was also posted in Prezi for parents to view from home.

As a follow-up activity, the students used Kidspiration to create a diagram where they pulled image symbols onto the canvas, one for each letter of the alphabet (e.g., T for a tiger image). An additional learning objective was to have students further their understanding of how we categorize information using the library categories in Kidspiration (e.g., Ocean Life, Transportation).

It was something to hear the collaboration as the students searched in the different categories of the symbol library, sharing, “I found a ‘P’ picture in the animal library! Has anyone found a Q?” It was also something to see the students who did some lateral thinking as they went into the US States category to use state names to match their letters. Too bad no state name starts with “Q”. 🙂

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