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Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Grandparents Day 2015

Today was our annual Grandparents Day! Grandparents start the day with a breakfast with their grandchildren, and then they are able to join the students in their classrooms. We took this opportunity to show them our Pic Collage skills. Students made a "freestyle" Pic Collage with the help of their grandparents. It was awesome to see the students be the teachers and create a lasting memory. Some of their work is below.





Friday, November 13, 2015

Learning to use Pic Collage

I introduced Pic Collage to my students this week, and they picked it up pretty well! We started with a simple Pic Collage of school supplies. I showed students my example below first.
Then, we worked through the process with their own school supplies. They took the pictures of their school supplies which provided good practice with the camera. Next, we added it to the grid in Pic Collage. The last step was to add the text. They had a lot of fun with this, because they got to choose the font and color. It was also a good opportunity to talk about choosing fonts and colors that are clear and readable with the background :) The last step was to save and Air Drop their collage to me. Below is a student sample.

Now that they had a handle on how to use Pic Collage, it was time to apply it to our learning! We were talking about sequencing this week, so I asked students to work in their groups to put our story cards in the correct order.
Once they had the sequence figured out, each student used their iPad to take a picture of each card. Then, they were instructed to insert their pictures into a Pic Collage in order. They finished up by numbering the pictures and inserting a sentence explaining each part of the story. Below is a student sample.
They finished the lesson by using their collage to summarize the story with a partner. Now that we're experts, we're going to show off our Pic Collage skills to our grandparents next week on Grandparents Day!

Friday, November 6, 2015

Growth vs. Fixed Mindset

This week we have been learning about growth versus fixed mindset. We started by reading The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. You can find it on Amazon here.

It's a great story to get kids thinking about how to look at a problem or task differently. After reading and discussing the story, we really dove into the concept of a fixed and growth mindset and what that looks and sounds like. I used a great bulletin board set I found on TpT from Sarah Gardner. You can find it here. We went through each pair of mindsets and talked about the differences and why one is a growth mindset and the other is fixed. After, I put the bulletin board up in our hallway as a daily reminder to have a growth mindset. I think it turned out great :)

Later in the week, the students worked in groups to sort statements into growth and fixed mindset. It was a great way to check for understanding and to work on working together as a team!