Summertime!
Summer time is here! I hope everyone has a safe and happy summer, with no sunburns and lots of fun, fun, fun!!!
In your spare time, you can check out some of these favorite websites to keep your brains thinking!
Computer Tutor – computer skills
Dance Mat Typing – typing skills
Red Fish Games – mouse and navigation skills
PBS Kids – language, math, and navigation skills
Nickelodeon – mouse and navigation skills
Nick Jr. – for Pre-K – mouse and navigation skills
Welcome Back!
This site is a great interactive site for young children to practice letters, numbers, and web navigation.
This site is a great resource for typing practice, learning the home row as well as other keyboarding skills.
Social Networking
All students will be working in Big Universe this week to enjoy a safe and secure method of reading, writing, and networking with other students in our school.
This quiz will be given as a pretest and post test to assess student knowledge of Social Networking.
Your child should have his/her log in information for Big Universe. Because it is web-based, he/she can read, write, and publish from home. What a great way to encourage learning over the holiday break! The stories can even be accessed and read on mobile devices!
What is Social Networking, and how can I stay safe?
Social networking is a large part of today’s world. Please help us keep children by giving them the information they need to stay safe and keep your family safe!
Creating & Presenting
In the upcoming weeks, all students will be working on using different types of presentation skills.
Kindergarten – Learn and practice the basic tools in the Pixie 2 drawing program.
First Grade – Practice using the tools in the Pixie 2 drawing program to create illustrations with text, and slide shows.
Second Grade – Create slide shows using the Pixie 2 drawing program. Extend knowledge of this program to the Write portion of the website www.biguniverse.com.
Third Grade – Create Keynote slide shows, with practice formatting text and adding photos. Keynote is a presentation program similar to Microsoft Powerpoint.
Fourth & Fifth Grade – Create flyers, posters, brochures, newsletters, etc. from the templates in Pages. Pages is a word processing program similar to Microsoft Word.
Big Universe
Big Universe is an online library for student use. It also provides the ability to write and publish your own stories. Our 2nd graders will be working in Big Universe this week to publish some poems written by some amazing 4th grade students at Sam Houston.
New Learning Tools
Kindergarteners will be learning to use the drawing program Pixie for the next couple of weeks. We will learn how to use many of the basic tools, which requires reasonable mouse skills. We will also begin learning to open the program from the dock, and continue to practice using the keyboard shortcut command +Q to close a program.
First and Second grade students will continue working their way through the benchmarking phase of SuccessMaker. After fall break these students will begin working on some fun creative projects in Pixie and Big Universe.
Third, Fourth, and Fifth grade students will be using iPads to read a Garfield Comic entitled “Online Safety.” They will play some embedded games, and discuss the information they are reading in small groups. In the next few weeks, they will take the information they have gained and consider their personal reactions in various scenarios.
Mrs. Dedman
