Elementary Technology

Check out the daily weather and date chart from ictgames.com . It is perfect for the SMART Board.  Just touch the red buttons to choose the weather and date.  You can also enter a student’s name by clicking “special person”.  If you want to save the page, just capture the screen and import it into your SMART notebook file. Thank you to Mrs. Coggin at SMARTboardgoodies.com for the link!

Thanks to one of my favorite sites,Teachers Love SMART Boards, you have access to a host of Halloween goodies all in one place.  There is a Halloween Resource page that lists Halloween clip art, games, puzzles, informational activities, create your own activities, Notebook resources and sound files. It is filled with lots activities that are ready to use. Be sure to check it out. http://www.teacherslovesmartboards.com/smartboards-and-halloween-resources.html

A new way to communicate….

Wall wisher is a free, online notice board maker.  It’s ideal for making announcements, posting notes and responding to questions. Wall wisher is an online bulletin board that can be collaborative and interactive. All you have to do is follow this link http://www.wallwisher.com/ to post a question, make an announcement, take notes or anything else that comes to mind. Your students can comment, respond and post. They can even include images or videos. Imagine reading a book and asking the students to post an answer to a question about the story online.  Not only do they write for an audience but they can also see each others responses.

I am not sure where the name Mrs. Pancake comes from, but I do know that this website is full of resources for teachers. The site contains “doodads” which are down-loadable, printable educational resources for parents, teachers and children. It is perfect for the beginning of the school year when you might be thinking about how to fill up that bulletin board or replacing some outdated posters or just making your classroom look a little better. The site is arranged in categories such as literacy, numeracy, classroom helpers etc.  Some doodad examples are:  colorful alphabets, number lines, borders, numbers, days of the week,  states of matter, faces of dice, clocks, seasons and one of my favorites…question words.  You can search by category or by tags and if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, Mrs. Pancake is also looking for new ideas!     http://mrspancake.com/index.php

Thanks to Teachers Love Smart Boards for the website thisissand.com . It’s the 21st century way to create sand art. Just tap on the SMART Board for a never ending stream of sand. Press the C key to change color, use the arrow keys to move around the board and create your masterpiece! Seems to me, this could be a great way to spend a rainy indoor recess.

If you are looking to create a game for your class but you don’t know how to get started, look no further. This site contains lots of game templates that can be customized to fit your content area. They all use PowerPoint so it is something you can also use on the SMART Board. Games can be a great way to review content, to make curriculum exciting and to engage students.  http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/PPT-games/

Earth Day is coming up and what better way to teach the kids about conserving than to use the SMART Board instead of paper and pencil tasks. These 3 lessons are full of interactive activities that will be lots of fun while also reinforcing those concepts that Earth Day is all about.  Rainforest has beautiful illustrations along with rich content to guide the students through the layers of the rainforest while they learn about the plants and animals that live there. Rainforest by Liz Koehler

The Glyph Poster allows students to use the notebook software to create an Earth Day poster while using pictorial forms of data collection. Perfect for integrating math skills with social studies content.  glyph-poster by Denise Sozda

Celebrate Earth Day is a comprehensive introduction to the holiday that is perfect for kindergartners and first graders. celebrate-earth-day by Christine Wolzl

Words allow us to have language. Language allows us to communicate. This website lets us know how important it is for us to use words. You must take a look at this site. It will astound you with it’s visual appeal. You can adopt words, sign up to receive a word of the day or simply explore the meaning of new words. How about asking your students to adopt a new word each week or assign an adoption as a homework assignment. There are many ways this site can be used to help extend a student’s vocabulary. Take a look at Save the Words!

Remember those little magnets you could play with on the refrigerator?  You could make words with individual letters? Or when you got a little older, you could string words together into phrases or even sentences? Well now you can do the same think, only online of course. Magnetic Poetry gives you a choice of 4 different kits of magnetic words on your own virtual refrigerator. Each kit is based on a different theme such as First Words, Storymaker and Best Friends. All you have to do is drag the words you choose over to the front of the refrigerator and create. This has endless possibilities in the classroom especially if you use this on the SMART Board. Imagine giving your class tasks at the refrigerator that can be differentiated for each student. You could ask one student to create a sentence using an action word. Or another student might be asked to create a sentence using spelling words.  And of course you can change the tasks with the different themes too.

March 2nd is Read Across America Day. The National Education Association has sponsored this event for the past 12 years. The focus of the event is to motivate children to read, in addition to helping them master basic skills. The NEA’s website has a dedicated section to this event with many resources and materials to help you celebrate this day. One resource is 4 free digital books from Dr. Seuss at Kidthing.  And don’t forget to visit Dr. Seuss’ fun filled website  Seussville for ideas too.