If you're new to my blog let me begin by telling you I teach at a 1:1 iPad school, that houses all of the sixth graders in our district; shout out to the class of 2020! Sorry I just had to get that in. This is the second year for such a school in my district. However, this will be my third year teaching with iPads. The previous two years we had not started the school year with iPads. This year students had iPads on day one, which was nice. I always start out letting the students explore the camera, so they get it out of their system. A week or so before the school year began Technology Tailgate posted this camera project, and I decided I would use it the first day of school. It worked out great!
Here are a couple of students completing the activity. One of my favorites, look at that simile.
This activity gave me the opportunity to discuss photo etiquette, mainly asking permission before taking someone's photo. To expand on this activity I would have students use Pic Collage (an app we will use throughout the year) to create a collage of their pictures. Thanks Technology Tailgate for the lesson.
In Social Studies this year we will study Ancient Civilizations. As an introduction I explained to students that while studying ancient civilizations we will learn where they are from and what their life was like back then. I wanted to play Kenny Chesney's song "Back Where I Come From," but had technical difficulty. Luckily, the principal walked in as I'm trying to get my speakers to work and begins singing the song, AWESOME! Students thought this was pretty cool, far better than my youtube video, I also thought it was pretty cool. In fact, I had her comeback the following day to sing it to my other Social Studies class. It would have been nice to record her, but she wouldn't let us. OK back to the lesson, after the song we discuss how we know a little about Kenny Chasney from his song. I then read my Back Where I Come From poem, I created using this template. There are several different templates available online, here is an example and another. I suggest editing it to fit the needs of your students. I crossed off some of the lines when students wrote theirs. For homework students were asked to take photos of items that go with their poem, if they could. We then used those photos to create a pic collage that matched our poems. If students could not take photos they were allowed to get them from the Internet. The final step was to place our poem into the Pic Collage. They turned out pretty nice. Here is a student's poem:
We've had a great first week of school. Be sure to follow me on Bloglovin or Instagram to see what other fun and creative activities my students are up to. How have your first days of school been?
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