Graphing on the SmartBoard for the Little Ones

Kindergarten students are graphing everyday. They are learning terms, such as block graphs, image graphs, more than, less than, most, and least. The classes are going “out in the field” (around school) to survey and record other students and teachers about their preferences.

Together with their teachers, they are graphing on paper, on the SmartBoard, even with M & Ms.

Students are identifying and working with columns and rows in order to create a class graph of different colored M & Ms. They are counting the amount of M & M of one color they received, adding them together and transferring that number to the class graph on the SmartBoard. Tapping on the cell shade reveals one M & M of that particular color underneath.

Logistics of creating the graph:

1. Insert a table with as many rows as you have students. Add as many columns as the maximum of M& Ms that students could receive
2. Add a photo of a student in first cell of each row
3. Insert the rest of the rows with an image of one color M & M
4. Add cell shades to each cell that contains an image of the M & M

Download the M&M Smartboard notebook.

The teachers also created  SB tables and just filled in the cells with a background color, creating a bar graph when each student records their preference. Each day they have different surveys that they graph.

Logistics of creating the graph:

1. Insert a table with as many rows and columns as needed
2. Fill a header (or bottom) row with clipart from the Gallery (or screenshots) that will represent possible answers for the survey
3. Fill the rest of the columns with a background color and cover with a cell share (right click or apple click) then select “add cell shade”

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Taking Notes- Summarizing Information- 2nd Grade Style

2nd Graders have moved on from their Maps and Globes unit to learning about communities. Their investigation started out with looking at a map of our planet Earth at night.

We zoomed in to look at urban and rural areas and compared cities, like Jacksonville and Buenos Aires. the teacher then guided the students to come up with nouns that were found in rural and urban areas. These nouns were entered in a Wordle to create the Word Cloud below. The more one noun was mentioned by the students, the larger the word appears in the cloud.

The school subscribes to the Discovery Education Video Streaming service. We picked an age appropriate video clip about City, Suburb, and Rural Communities.

Each movie was divided into several segments. The objective of the lesson was to learn to extract information from a different media than a text book. In addition to learn about and work  with different media information, students also were working with different note taking methods.

Students were equipped with a paper, pencil and a clipboard, while watching the first segment, introducing the different communities and explaining general differences, . We started watching the video until a student yelled out “Atzor” (Stop in Hebrew), then summarized what they had heard and everybody wrote it on their notepaper. We had a notebook paper up on the big screen too to help with spelling. Students then called out “Lech” (Go in Hebrew) when everyone was done to continue to video. Notes were full sentences.

The second video clip was about life in the cities. Students, again, stopped the movie when they felt important information was being communicated. We then took a screenshot (with Skitch) and dragged it into a SmartBoard Notebook. The class made sure, by forwarding or rewinding the video,  to find just the right image / screenshot that was representative and was going to help them remember the information.

We watched and listened to the third video clip and extracted keywords to help us learn about suburbs.

The next step will be to continue watching the Rural segments of the video, taking notes and then compare and contrast all three communities in a Venn Diagram by moving the images or text in the appropriate areas according if they belong in one or more categories or not.

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Our Own Private Pirate Island

I wanted to add my reflection to the lesson, as a follow up to my post” Map skills and the SmartBoard” with 2nd graders from a few days ago.

As one of the activities for their maps and globe unit, 2nd graders worked collaboratively by creating an imaginary island according to specific directions.

Directions were:

1. Draw a Compass Rose
2. Draw an island
3. Draw an Ocean around the island
4. There is a mountain range on the East side of the island
5. A river running from the mountains West towards the Ocean
6. Draw a small lake in the South of the island
7. There is a pirate ship anchored off the Northwest shores of the island
8. A pod of dolphins is swimming from the North towards the pirate ship
9. 5 palm trees are found in the North of the island
10. A princess is hiding to the East of the palm trees
11. A treasure is hidden in the Southern part of the mountain range
12. 6 pirates have split into two groups and are searching across the island for the treasure
13. The queen’s ship is approaching the island from the North to rescue her daughter

Here is the screenshot of the completed island.

After the map was created, I re-told the story, taking care to include as many times as possible the cardinal directions in relationship to the symbols. I paused in my story to make sure that students were following me on the map and asked them to supply the direction a character in the story was going next.

Ex. “…So, the princess was running (North) towards the beach, where her mother’s ship was approaching….”

Many skills were addressed in this activity, such as :

• following directions,
• cardinal directions
• symbols and visual representation,
• collaboration
• retelling of a story from a map

Although some children were getting antsy, while waiting for their turn to come up to draw or drag and drop the next step, everyone seemed to be engaged when I retold the story. The classroom teacher con further extend the story by asking students  to write the story about the pirate island and the princess’ rescue down on paper as homework.

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