Thursday, June 1, 2017

It's A Whole New 3D World!

As pricing becomes more reasonable, 3D printing is becoming more popular in education. Here are a few ways that I am  integrating 3D printing into the elementary ELA curriculum.


To start the year, I like to build a classroom community by reading How Full is Your Bucket?


We thought it would be a great idea to create a medal/necklace to give to students in the class that might need a drop in their bucket that day.  The students used the page below to design their medal. We used the Printshop App and Tinkercad program to recreate their designs.  We chose a few to print out and hang on a chain.






We have the necklaces hanging up where they are easy to get to and hand out to students that need a lift that day. They wear them for the day and then return them before they go home.



Allowing students to create awards that correlate to classroom lessons is a way to get them excited to participate and do their best in class. After reading aloud several books to the class, they created their own book awards that we could hand out to the books we already read and some for future read-alouds. We again used the Printshop App to create the medals. We displayed the medals with the books in our classroom library.






We always share our writing after working through several writing lessons and completing our final copy. To highlight the amazing writing of others, we created our own writing awards to be printed on the 3D printer and displayed with our writing.






During our poetry unit, we read a lot of poetry about snowflakes. We then wrote our own snowflake poetry.  The students also designed their own special snowflake.  We chose a few to be printed on the 3D printer to be displayed with their poems.  









Thingiverse.com has a snowflake machine that will create unique snowflakes to print.  You can also search their site and choose some snowflakes that others have created and print them as well.  That's what we did!


Next, we did an author study on one of our favorite authors, Patrician Polacco.  To see the author study lessons and ideas, click HERE. 
To conclude our unit this year, we read The Keeping Quilt.  We discussed the words and symbols that would describe our class that we would put on our own keeping quilt. The students then designed their own keeping quilt square.  We voted on one to print for the class. We recreated the design using Tinkercad.  Then, we displayed it on our classroom door all year!






Design a Survival Tool was probably our favorite 3D printing activity this year!  I read aloud several survival stories to the class this year. 



 During our read-alouds, we discussed what might have really helped the characters in the story to survive or make their life a little easier.  The students brainstormed ideas and designed their own survival tools. They also had to present their survival tool to the class and explain how it works and how it would have helped the characters in the stories.  The class voted on their favorite survival tool. That is the tool we printed on the 3D printer!




Survival Tool Example!




To end the year, we did an author study on a nonfiction author, Sandra Markle.  We LOVE her book series... What if You Had Animal....


We read the whole series!  While reading the series, the students took notes on their one favorite animal from each book. Then they created their own hybrid animal using their favorite animal part from each book.  They had to draw their animal and give it a new name.




The students had to present their animal to the class and we voted on our favorite animal to print out on the 3D printer! 


Character Trait Key Chains
Another great idea is to create character trait key chains.  Instead of the usual book report kind of activity, have the students brainstorm character traits for the book characters and design a key chain with keys that have each character trait.  Check out the amazing example below. This example can be downloaded from Thingiverse!




Decoders
Print decoders for students to use to decode a special writing prompt or message for the day.  They can also create coded messages for a drops in a bucket note to a friend. This example can also be downloaded from Thingiverse!




Classroom Management Ideas:
(The examples below can be downloaded from Thingiverse.)

Instead of a fidget spinner, something a little less distracting... the spinner ring.



Organize your headphones with the headphone organizer wraps.




RESOURCES:
Helpful tools to use when designing projects or looking for 3D printing examples:


Tinkercad is a free program that allows you to design your own projects to be printed on the 3D printer. You need to create your own account, but it is FREE.



Thingiverse is a great place to search for ideas. This is a place that other 3D printing enthusiasts use to share their projects. You can download them for free and print out for yourself. 



This is a free app that allows you to create medals, vases, rings, shapes, as well as take a picture of your own drawing to print out.  It's an excellent app and very easy to use!


Monday, May 22, 2017

End of the Year Read-Aloud Activities

At the end of the year I love to read aloud all the fun little stories I have sitting on my shelf.  Here are few of my favorites with a couple fun reader's response activities to go with them.













Media Literacy

It is really hard to find resources to teach media literacy to K-2 students!

If you have a subscription to Brainpop, they do have an excellent video about media literacy.  You can find it HERE.

Another great resource is media smarts.  They have several videos about media.  You can find them HERE.


After introducing media with these videos, we made flipbooks in our interactive notebooks that had all the media literacy notes we needed.  We also completed a couple sorting worksheets to review the concepts.

At the end of our unit we created posters and pamphlets to help to promote and sell our Market Day items.

You can download all the media literacy pages HERE.








Sequence This Story!

Teaching sequencing?  Here's a quick cut/sort page for the kids to practice this skill.







Sunday, April 9, 2017

Nonfiction and Fiction Text Features

Looking for materials to introduce or review nonfiction text features, or to discuss how fiction is different than nonfiction? Maybe some of the resources I have listed below will be useful to you!


Here is a pre-assessment I used to see what the students already know about the features.  You can use this as a post-assessment as well!





After introducing the lesson and discussing each text feature, the students work in pairs to do a nonfiction text features scavenger hunt.  I give each of them a nonfiction text to hunt through and discuss what they find. They use the page below to write what they notice during the scavenger hunt.





I also created a couple games for the students to play in groups to review fiction/nonfiction text features.

Here is the nonfiction text features sort game board:




Click HERE to download the game.


Here is another game that allows the students to sort between a fiction or a nonfiction text feature:



Click HERE to download the game.


We also played a nonfiction text features pop-up game.  I read a definition and the students "pop-up" with the card that has the correct text feature name. 







I hope some of these resources will be helpful to you!