PC activity!!!

Hello everyone, it’s Paula🙋!!!! I’m posting a great activity intended for 2nd grade of primary about the “water cycle”. I really hope you like it and find it useful... 😀

TOPIC 

💦The Water Cycle 💦

CONTEXT

·        -This session is intended for students 2^nd of primary

·        -The students have learned previously that the "Water Cycle" consists in The Sun heating up the water from oceans, lakes and rivers and water changes into water vapor by the process of evaporation. As the water vapor rises up into the air, it starts cooling down and forms tiny water droplets. 

Storytime!

Hello everyone!

We are Laura Carrillo and Elena Joaquin. We both like storytelling and as a teachers, we often do it with ours students creating a great performance to motivate and encourage them as much as possible. In this case, Elena has carried out in her class a storytelling about Goldilocks and the three bears and she designed a wonderful material, which without any doubt we have decided to reclycle her material to make a book through story jumper. This fairy tale is perfect to work on the structures, vocabulary and sequences.

The session would be developed in 2nd Grade with 12 students in class.
The class has three parts: 
1. Story time 
2. What's missing game and matching game
3. Write their own different endings

In order to see the story, you just have to click in the following picture to be directly linked to the story creation.

Read this free book made on StoryJumper

As you can see, storyjumper allows you to create, design, layout and/or print book. A part from using it you as a teacher, it can be used by students as well. For instance, the teacher can ask them for a different ending of the story since the Goldilocks has it already. In that way, it can be a very motivating tool to encourage them as much as possible. In addition of this point, it is free so that everyone can use it, which is very important!

In relation to this storytelling lesson, as an introduction of the story time, you could invent a short chant for example “one, two, three, story please! In that way, you make students feel that something special is going to happen. After the chant, ask students for absolute silence while you tell the story unless you want students to participate. It is annoying for them and for you to hear someone talking over the story or to have a kid bothering the others who are trying to understand the story.

It is also a good idea to encourage students to interact with the story. Ask them questions while you read, or ask them to mime parts of the story. We can also avoid simply reading the story. You might try telling the story using different voices. When you finish the story, you can ask the students about their favourite part, their favourite character, etc., and playing some game to check if they have understood the vocabulary and also to reviewing the vocabulary.

In our case, we've created a matching game. If you clic HERE you'll be able to see it.
Match The Memory website makes a matching game with photos you upload yourself, easily combined with a word card or a picture pair. It is free, useful and fun!

The aims for this lesson are the following:

Aims: 

-To develop students' listening and speaking skills.
-To enjoy activities based around a traditional fairy tail.
-To respect everyone’s turn to speak.
-To learn vocabulary related to the story such as adjectives and furniture.

Classroom management:

Story time shouldn’t be done in the same place as table time. So, we would invite students to sit on the floor in a semicircle and you can sit on a chair in front of them so they can all see you. We would make sure that they all are sitting down properly. It is very important to create a relaxed atmosphere in the classroom.
After telling the story, we would remind them to take turns and cooperate with each other properly.

Language skills:

The four skills are present in this lesson plan:

Listening: When telling the story, students would be listening carefully and afterwards, they would be listening to each other to discuss and agree with the different ending that they have to create.

Speaking: When telling the story, students would be participating every time that the teacher asks a question. After that, they would be discussing what type of different ending they want to create.

Writing: When students would be creating their endings.

Reading: When students would be reading their own book to the others.

Competences:

Competence in processing information and use of ICT: When students would be using the laptops to create their own different ending.

Linguistic and audio-visual: The students would be applying the four skills.

Learning to learn: They would be the ones that have to organize the timing while solving problems.

Autonomy, initiative and decision taking: Since they have to create different endings, they have to take decisions themselves.

Social and civic: When working in groups.

Cultural and artistic: Using their imagination and creating on their own.

Knowledge and interaction with the world: students would be learning vocabulary related to the book such as the members of the family (as a review), adjectives and furniture of the house. 

Assessment:

In terms of assessing them, there would be two types of assessment:

- Observation grid

- Self-evaluation through rubrics.

Hope you like this lesson plan! You're more than welcome to use it with your students!

Bitsboard is a must!

Hello again!

We are Marta and Amaranta and we will like to talk about ipads, the new trendy electronic devices in classrooms. In our context, almost all children know what an Ipad is and how to use it without us having to explain how it works detaily. However, it is true that teachers can help them to get to know more advanced skills that this tool can offer us. The world of apps has grown considerably for the past five years and currently teachers are lucky to have a plenty of online resources that enable students to review and learn new content, play games in groups, take up new linguistic activities, save time...etc as well as develop their digital competence!

In this post we would like to present you an amazing app we have discovered recently called: BitsBoard, the top 5 education game in the US app Store. Bitsboard is a free app for Ipads that includes a variety of different mini games -such as flashcards, matching and multiple choice games (called “photo touch”) and some others where students have to create words (“called word builder”)- on subjects at different levels of difficulty. This is a simple app, easy to deal with and, consequently, it can be used by children of any level, from ages 4 and up. In addition, teachers and students can also create and customize their own games, taking advantage of the available templates of “boards”, in order to use them as teaching tools.  

BitsBoard APP

ACTIVITY:

Target audience: Initial level of primary education (2nd year).

Bloom Taxonomy: (LOTS) Identify,remember, understand

Placement in curriculum: music (CLIL)

Aims of the game:

• To be able to learn the names of 12 instruments and their spelling.
• To be able to classify 12 instruments in their corresponding families (wind, string and percussion).
• To be able to use Bitsboard app.

Language:

• Vocabulary related to musical instruments: piano, guitar, violin, drum, harmonica, xylophone, maracas, accordion, flute, recorder, harp, clarinet.
• Expressions: belongs to, go together.
• Spontaneous language used by students in class.

Competences involved:

• Linguistic and audio-visual: through that sequence of activities, students will they develop the reading and the listening skills. All the activities have the option to include sound hints that say clearly the names of the instruments whenever you need it. In addition, one of the aims of these activities is to have an idea of the spelling .
• Musical: in these games students are learning some musical instruments that belong to the wind, string and to the percussion families.
• Digital: students have to be able to use Bitsboard in their Ipads.

Development:

• In order to detect our learner’s previous knowledge about the topic, we will carry out a “review game” (called like that) from Bitsboard. There is an image of one musical instrument and students will try to remember its name. Then, they will click on “tap to see the answer” and will self-assess their previous knowledge by answering the question: “How well did you know this?” and the possible answers are “not well”, “somewhat” and “very well”. Consequently, we could see what is the level of the class in this topic and students could review and acquire the vocabulary.
  
  

  

  Check previous knowledge
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Then, we will play a game named “Pop Quiz” to learn it better and review the names of the 12 musical instruments and focus also the attention on their spelling. This game consists of a multiple choice where it appears an image of an instrument and, below, two or more written names of instruments. 
  
  Afterwards, next step will consist of classifying every instrument in his family. For that, we will play a game called “Related items”, in which students have to drag an instrument next to another from the same family (p.e., the violin and the guitar belong to the wind family).
  Afterwards, next step will consist of classifying every instrument in his family. For that, we will play a game called “Related items”, in which students have to drag an instrument next to another from the same family (p.e., the violin and the guitar belong to the wind family).

  

  Related Items

  

                        Pop Quiz: What do you think?

Finally, to assess if students have achieved the objectives established, we will put into practise a game called “True or False” in which students will work both on the names of the instruments and on the spelling. The game is the following: it appears the picture of an instruments and below one name written. The student has to decide if the text matches with the image and, also, if the text is well written. In case both things are good, they click on the tick (true) but if one of those things is wrong, they click the cross (false).  We will give them more than one opportunity to do so they can practise it before the definitive one.

                  

Assessment: Is "Meracas" well written?

Feedback provided by Bitsboard: every time a child does an activity correctly, he/she receives a positive feedback comment (orally), such as “Well done!, “perfect”, “wonderful!”, etc.

Fast finishers students: Taking into account that Bitsboard offers much more minigames, the fastests students can explore all of them and play freely whatever game they want related to musical instruments.  

Classroom organisation:

Students will have the option to play the first three games individually or in pairs. Despite the fact they choose to play in pairs, each student will use his own Ipad, but they will discuss the answer all together first. It is important to make them remember that all the members of the group or pairs need to touch the ipad and select an option so they can alternate turns. The last activity, as it is the assessment, will be played individually.

Classroom management:

Following the tips that we have learnt in the ICT lessons, we would ask students to set Ipad aside when they didn’t need them to avoid classroom management problems. When we are telling them the instructions of the activity, we would say “Ipads facing at me”, so we can make sure that they pay attention and don’t get distracted. Moreover, we would ask students for assistance if we need their help or we get stuck (Experts TIC) In addition, at random points during the session, we will ask students to flip their screens of the Ipads so we could check that they are doing the task proposed. We believe that it is always important for the teacher to have used the app before and have tried to create a game to foresee the problems that can arise.

Added value through ICT

• Gives extra motivation for children. Children love using Ipads and show other kids their digital skills.
• Visual support that help them memorize better the vocabulary, good for different learning styles.
• Save time.
• Can be saved and repeated whenever they want.

iPad Apps (Mariona, Gemma and Mireia)

Trying with iPads

As the first experience with iPads, we had the chance to work with two apps called Book Creator and Bits Board.

Book Creator gives you the possibility to create your own book with all the new technologies possibilities such as camera, pictures, videos and voice recording. We thought that a good way to use all these possibilities was to create a book about emotions. Each group could work with one emotion and try to represent it with a picture from Internet, a picture taken by themselves, a video or a voice recording. This activity is about understanding the meaning of the emotions and creating a way to explain them.

Another possibility, as you can see in the example that we created, is to design a book related to more than one emotion. Children can work in peers or threes and they can talk about which things make them feel happy, sad, confused, angry, annoyed, scared, bored or whatever. In this second option students can learn more vocabulary because they work on more than one emotion and they can also learn more things about their classmates. After finishing the creation of the book, each group will be present theirs to the rest of the class.

We designed this activity for second year of primary because of the topic but this app can be used in other school years; we just need to adapt the content we want to work on.

We think that this app is very useful, first of all because it is a HOTS activity and it promotes the use of High order thinking skills. It allows learners to work on the four skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and they learn new vocabulary. When they are creating their book they can write or record audios (speak). To check if what they have written is correct they have to read it and to check the audios they have to listen to it. They also have to read or listen the other groups’ presentations. Related to the vocabulary, they learn the name of the emotions, and also other vocabulary related to these emotions. Maybe they want to say “I feel scared when I hear a Thunder” but they don’t know the word “thunder” in English, so they have to ask to the teacher and then they learn it.

Another advantage that this app has is its visual attraction. As we have said before, it offers a lot off possibilities (pictures, audio, images…) and kids love it. Children also have an active role doing this activity and they can experiment with the IPAD and this make them be motivated. Finally, the IPAD itself makes the activity more attractive to students. They usually love new technologies.

Related to the example we created about emotions, we think that it is a beneficial activity for the teacher because with children’s creation, the teacher can know better their students; their interests and fears.

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0XjKFxt21t2dHY0Ym5WcV9adWExaXVjRFJ1MUpXTWdTX3RV/view?usp=sharing

Bits Board activity is the second app we discovered in the last session. This app allows you to create flashcards related to any topic. You can take pictures or choose images that the app already offers you and write the name under the picture. Then, if you want, you can add the audio of the word. You can record the word with your voice or if you prefer, the app can also produce the words by recognizing them ones you have written them. In our example you can see flashcards related to the parts of the body.
It is a good app to work on LOTS (low order thinking skills) activities.

We think that this app is also really interesting because instead of showing to the students some flashcards that don’t mean anything for them, you can make them create these flashcards that you are going to use afterwards. In this way, their learning is more meaningful because they work on the vocabulary while they are creating the flashcards and when the teacher uses these flashcards in the class, they feel proud and also they have fun because they can see themselves on the pictures.

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0XjKFxt21t2a2NwMmVqU2swYXM/view?usp=sharing