Showbie Class Discussion - Journal time help

Journal time is often overwhelming at the beginning of school.  When spelling words, so many kids get caught up in "how do you spell?"  I always encourage the kids to try 3 before me:  look on the word wall (also we have a digital word wall in Showbie Word wall Class), try to sound it out, and ask a friend.  For their 4th option of asking me, I came up with using Showbie's Class Discussion feature to help me out a bit. You will notice in the picture- a few of the students spelled words they knew, which is great for confidence.  I also use the voice memo option to answer kids who need to sound out words or look more carefully at the world wall-I simply say "sound it out" or "look at the word wall".  The kids did have a blast with this, fun journal time interaction.

  

Here's a student's journal page:

 

Free October Journal file here

Showbie+GoNoodle+PicCollage App Smash=Sanity

 

My 1st graders and I love our GoNoodle time at the end of the day!  The only negative, for me, was song choice...so I came up with another routine to solve this problem.  

Here's what I did:

1.  I created a class in Showbie called:  GoNoodle - Pick 3

2.  I created an assignment in the class with screen shots of about 10 songs.  I will add new assignments with     different songs  each week for the students choose from.

3.  I have students use Showbie's new feature called Class Discussion to cast 3 votes.

4. We tally the votes to see which songs got the most votes and "voila" your songs have been picked for the day!

This seemed to fit right into our morning iPad work routine and the tally counting was a great math and social studies(voting) lesson at morning carpet time.  And let's not forget, I did not experience the end of the day bombardment of song choices, and really, everyone won because they ALL love ALL of the songs!

Thinglink on Epic Book Reports

Here's a Thinglink on Epic book Reports.  I app-smashed Showbie, Epic, PicCollage, Green Screen by DoInk, SeeSaw, and of course Thinglink. Click the link below to check out this interactive Thinglink.

Epic Book Report Thinglink

Tiny Tap in our 1st grade classroom

The following video shows how I use Tiny Tap in my 1st grade classroom.

~teacher-student games
~student games
~teacher games

Make sure you check out the links below the video.

my Tiny Tap profile

student game

student-teacher game

Tiny Tap tutorials (YouTube channel)

Allie's 3D game

Jadyn's ABC order game

Epic Oral Book Reports

The kids chose a nonfiction book on Epic.  They read their book and jotted down a few facts about their subject.  Then we created a green screen oral book report.  The kids were responsible to find their picture and they shared it with me for the green screen project via our Showbie Picture class.  We used Green Screen by DoInk.   These turned out really cute and we shared them with our parents on SeeSaw. 

Here is Carsen with his 

"book report" on Cobras.

Google Forms for Pick a Partner

Epic - An activity we did with this wonderful app.

If you are unfamiliar with EPIC, you really need to check it out!  It is completely free for educators.  It is a library FULL of children's books, some are even AR books.   Check it out at getepic.com.   There is also an app-search EPIC. Encouraging parents to subscribe will help EPIC to remain free for teachers.  It is very reasonably priced.  

Cale explains how we did our book reports (paragraphs) using EPIC and the 4-square method.  

Hunter chose a book about Sloths.

SeeSaw-A Learning Journal

I cannot wait to use this app in my classroom!!!  It will work with everything I use and do!  

iPads in Our 1st Grade Classroom

In this video you will see that the kids did most of the interviewing with their own iPads.  I simply pulled all of the material together to create our iMovie.  This video is one of the  featured videos in our school's iBook that that we entered to be named an Apple Distinguished school.

Here are some of the things you observe in the video:

~iPads used in center time with manipulatives such as word tiles for the app Word Wizard.
~RAZ Kids, a Learning A-Z app-kids read on their own level and at their own pace.
~Spelling City- Kids practice their weekly spelling words
~Book Creator-kids and teacher create class books on their own and together
~Showbie-students complete worksheet type work on their iPad…beginners take a little time to
   learn how to manipulate the screen and using a stylus…I LOVE it when the kids figure it out, it
   saves time and a TON of paper.
~Kidblog-we dabbled very little with this, hopefully I can give it another go next year.
~Scrappad-kids create digital scrapbook pages-they love this!
~QR Code Reader like iNigma-there are many others