February Hearts

Kindergarten classes created a Valentine for their parents this month in Kid Pix. They worked on a template of 2 hearts. They added a picture inside one of the hearts and a message "I love you" to the other heart. Kindergarten students have been working on their ABC's. During the month of January classes visited the www.starfall.com website to learn more about the sounds of the letters. At the end of each letter lesson, there's an activity for them to do. Students love this website. We have been working on beginning letter sounds. We also use the Big Thinkers Kindergarten program to choose several items that begin with a particular letter. This one is very cute and fun for the students. Students also spent some time solving a maze in Big Thinkers. This one got interesting as students also needed to feed some animals the proper food as they solved the maze.

1st grade began study of the animal groups in their classrooms. As each animal group was studied, in technology class, they accomplished a corresponding activity using a template in our Kid Pix program. This will continue through April. We also began the i-safe Internet safety program. We discussed community and personal safety on the Internet. We played music and danced to songs that are provided by the i-safe program. Students did an activity in Kid Pix that used the words from one of the songs with a picture of i-buddy, the i-safe mascot.

2nd grade created a valentine card in publisher. They learned to insert clip art to the card and type in text boxes. A few students needed to finish recording into their power point slide. I put all the slides together into one class slide show. I sent it to the classroom teachers for them to send home via their email lists. Classes began the i-safe program on Internet safety. This is a program set up under the direction of the Dept. of Justice. We discussed community, in which rules to stay safe in our community and rules to stay safe on the Internet are compared. We also discussed personal safety while using the Internet, including 5 tips for kids from the FBI. Students saw a couple of videos from a website http://www.netsmartz.org/ that go with our topics of Internet safety.

3rd grade classes finished our i-safe Internet safety program. This month they were introduced to excel spreadsheet. Then students did a word scramble puzzle in excel spreadsheet about computer security. The puzzle took a couple of classes to complete. Classes have also learned about personal safety using the Internet. They saw videos and played appropriate games on http://www.netsmartz.org/. They were also introduced to intellectual property, learning to cite sources they use in reports.

4th grade continued to work on spreadsheets. In January, classes entered data about the number of different animals belonging to members of each class. They have formated or changed the original setup of the spreadsheet (adding rows, changing column width, etc) and doing a formula to add a column. In February, some classes needed to add a pie chart depicting the data, including a label and per cent of each type of animal. They continued to complete the spreadsheet by adding a conclusion, after examining the data and chart. Each student's conclusion was different. They printed these spreadsheets. Any student who finished, worked with an online madlib, done in excel. They also did some keyboarding in UltraKey. Mrs. Kaminski's class had finished the Pets spreadsheet earlier. This class spent February in UltraKey, our keyboarding program.