It Looked Like...

This week kindergarten students listened to the book It Looked Like Spilt Milk. They then drew their own cloud shapes using the fill bucket and eraser in Kid Pix. When done, they told Miss Frank what it looked like and she used the text tool to write a sentence.

Image Swirl

Google Image Swirl is a new way to search for images and view the results. Click on an image you like, and it will show you similar matches so you can find the best one. It is still in the experimental stage, so you can't find everything on it, but it is fun to use!

Sheppard Software

This week first and second grade students are doing activities on a web site called Sheppard Software. First grade students are creating animal habitats on the Create! page. Second grade students are practicing parts of speech, punctuation, and capitalization on the Grammar page. These pages and much of the Sheppard web site are great for using with the SMARTboard and classroom laptops, not to mention at home.

TYP Kindergarten and Fourth Grade

Thursday, May 19, is Teach Your Parent night for students in kindergarten and fourth grade. Students may bring in adult guests to teach. Kindergarteners are going to teach about the painting and drawing program Kid Pix. Fourth grade students are going to choose what they want to teach. The event runs from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.

http://goo.gl/

Do you have a long web address you are planning to put onto paper? There are many shorteners out there to make it easier for you and whoever you are sending the link to. One of those options is the Google URL Shortener. Copy and paste a long address into the box and Google will give a short address that points to the same spot. Besides making it easier for people to get to the web page, it also keeps track of how many times people use the shortened address. I recommend only using it if you are distributing the address on paper. If you are emailing, keep the address long so people can see where they are going.

Tool School

Parents, community volunteers, and high school students came to the elementary school last week to participate in Tool School. Tool School is a career exploration program for third grade students organized by Gail Cherry. It ties into the third grade science unit on simple machines. You can read about it and leave comments on the third grade Tool School Blog. Students wrote the entries in computer class and hope to get many comments from Charlevoix and all over the world.

It's a Lulu!

Lulu is a great site where you can create and order books and other things. Want to make some extra money for your classroom? Create a class book, let parents know about it, and watch the money role in. You can create books with recipes, stories, pictures, poems, etc. They even let you create calendars.