4th Grade Tech Fair 2017

Last week, as part of our Prairie Hill STEAM celebration, 4th grade students got to show off their work on their independent projects. All students in 4th grade have the option of completing a project by themselves or in a group to present at our Hill showcase. We showed kids some past projects and some other options. This year, we gave them the choice of doing a technology project, or a science project. We had about 30 kids work hard and present their projects to our school last week.

Of those 30 kids, I worked with a few other teachers to select 3 projects that would move on to the ITEC Student Tech Fair in Coralville. This tech fair is open to all of Eastern Iowa and had 58 projects showcased. We selected Cole Younger and his video game, Hannah Hughes and the app she created, and Jayson Kubik & Drew DeSmidt for a virtual tour of our school. 

Hannah created an app that teaches about gymnastics. She took her own videos of moves she wanted to teach, designed her own logo, and worked with 4th grade teacher Tricia Ward to put it together in an app using appsbar.com. To see and download her app, click here!

Drew & Jayson wanted to make a virtual representation of Prairie Hill. We borrowed a Ricoh Theta camera from my friend Stacy at GWAEA and they took pictures of every area of our school. They put those pictures on a website they made, as well as uploaded them to Google Maps. New students and teachers can get a feel for what our building looks like before even stepping foot inside. My favorite *might* be the picture of the library! 

Cole made an awesome video game called Run Frog Run using Bloxels. He worked really hard to create 5 levels where the frog is trying to destroy the evil bunnies who have kidnapped his friends. He used both the physical blocks and did a bunch of coding on the iPad app to make this game. You can play the game online by clicking here and then scrolling to the bottom and typing in 7676 x 23232 for the coordinates to warp to his game. 

I am super proud of all these kiddos! They did a great job presenting their projects in front of adult judges and peers and representing Prairie Hill.

And of course, as a special treat, we stopped at Coral Ridge Mall to eat lunch. And what kind of teacher would I be if I didn't treat them to ice cream for their hard work?! And naturally, we had to take an ice cream selfie. Not sure if the kids or teachers enjoyed ice cream more...and special thanks to Jill Novotny for joining us! It was a great day!

Week of April 17

This week our kindergarteners listened to some nursery rhymes from the flip nursery rhyme series. Each book has the original nursery rhyme, plus the same story from a different perspective. The kids thought they were hilarious! We also read a handful of poems from

Our first graders listened to the poem called Sick by Shel Silverstein. We then listed things that might make us say "ouch" and wrote our own list poems about them! This idea came from Nancy VandenBerge over at her blog First Grade Wow.

Our second graders have been working on opinion writing during class, which ties right in writing a book review. We read the book Stuck by Oliver Jeffers and each student gave it a star ranking, similar to the star rankings on Goodreads, which is what I use to record what I read. Kids had to state why they liked or didn't like the book.

Our 3rd graders are working on using context clues to determine word meanings. First, we talked about how many words they think they know, and how we learn new words. I found a handful of poems that had some tricky vocabulary words in them. I took pictures of them and recorded myself reading them and put them into a slideshow shared with students. For each one, I gave a multiple choice answer bank. The correct answers for all of the questions formed the answer for a riddle at the end. Kids did a great job working on these independently or with a partner. They didn't have enough time to finish, so we finished as a whole group and eventually solved the riddle!

Fourth graders are beginning a study of Greek mythology during library for the last few weeks of school. To kick things off, we did a Breakout EDU box to learn the story of Pandora's Box. This was the first time I had created my own Breakout, and I was a little nervous about it! It took several hours to plan out, but planning was really fun. This is my visual planning sheet.

Students came in, and we read part of the story of Pandora. I skipped the beginning, for the sake of time, and skipped the ending. Students were told that the last thing that was in Pandora's box knocking was now in our Breakout box. All of the clues that they needed to solve the 5 locks were on the table. Many of the clues really challenged our kids. They had to do some research, use our library search, and use the index of a book. About half of them had never done a breakout box before, but almost all of them said they really enjoyed it!

Once they got the box open, they saw that HOPE is what was left in Pandora's box. In the story, hope is the remedy for all of the evil things that came out of the box the first time she opened it. As a reflection, students wrote about something that gives them hope, what hope means to them, or something they hope for. I loved reading their reflections--such deep thoughts for 4th graders.

                                     

Dr. Seuss Bracket!

The last two years we have had pretty epic Dr. Seuss celebrations, where every class comes in on one day and listens to a book, plus has a Seuss themed snack and a fun photo booth. Because of our book fair and conferences this year, we weren't able to do it all in one day. So, I thought we'd just spend the whole month celebrating Seuss, instead!

March is also the month of basketball, for those of us who love March Madness, so we combined the two to create an 8 book Dr. Seuss book bracket. At my previous building, I did a 16 book bracket, but because of time, we did 8 this year.

The kindergarteners and first graders, as well as half of our second graders voted for the left side of the bracket, while the other half of second grade, plus our third and fourth graders voted on the right side. 

We displayed all of our Dr. Seuss books for checkout throughout the month!

The first week, each class read the two books in their section of the bracket. After that, we read one book each week. I bought all of the Dr. Seuss books on my iPad so that I could project them onto the board for kids to see. Then, I created a Google Form for kids to vote on each matchup. They used iPads to vote.

This is what our bracket ended up like. The Lorax won by a big margin!

I keep a document of book quotes as I read, and the last week of our tournament, I pulled out a Dr. Seuss quote from The Lorax. This is one of the best!

During the last week, we also had several Dr. Seuss themed games to play! It is safe to say that everyone had a lot of fun!