Grade 2: Wow Day Invitations

Just a quick one today, in between Minetest updates.

Next week is our Wow Day at school. Our Wow Day is similar to a parent showcase, the children have their classwork and artwork ready to show to their visiting families. We had been asked to create an invitation for Wow Day and it was a great excuse to polish up our MS Word skills. I had provided the Grade 2s with a very standard template for an invitation to our Wow Day. It looked something like this:

Yawn.

Functional, but not very exciting. Within an hour lesson, they managed to transform their bland templates into these!

Jazzy underwater invitations.

Skills that we worked on:

• Inserting picture - This is a tricky one for my students since it involves navigating through the file directory which they are still getting used to. 

• Formatting picture - The only way we could get our invitations the way we wanted them was to use the wrap picture - tight option. This is a new skill for us.

• Adding page border - Brand new skill. At least this option is easy to locate. They were excited about the large range of borders on offer and I think we'll be adding a border to every piece of work from now on!

• Formatting font - We do this often but students still needed reminder about where the font style options were. Many children went all out and changed font colour, style and size.

• Adding adjectives - We jazzed up the boring sentences by adding our own adjectives to describe our artwork and the Wow Day.

Sun Safety and Reptiles

Hello!

We have kick-started our way into the New Year here at Bridge House School. In Junior Primary we were lucky enough to be kitted out with a brand-new set of 26 lab computers, all upgraded to Windows 10. My students (as well as myself) have been tackling the new features with much enthusiasm.

The Grade 3s have been learning about sun safety. As we live in South Africa, it's summer right now and our sun can be extreme! We created Sun Tips posters using MS Publisher. This was done without a template, after our discussion about being safe in the sun I let them design their own posters.

These are proudly displayed in one of the Grade 3 classrooms.

Our Grade 2 students have started to delve into the world of reptiles. The acrostic exercise was my inspiration, despite how common they seem to be I've never used them in a lesson before. I laid out the R E P T I L E S on an MS Word page and had the students use their imagination to fill in the letter lines. I got the snazzy reptiles border from Sparklebox. 

Link to template for R E P T I L E S Acrostic page here.

Reptile fact acrostics on display outside in the Grade 2 playground.

For Coding Club this year I have tentatively begun to use the desktop-installed version of Scratch. This term I have a boisterous group of 15 young coders. I'm pleased to report that 3 girls are included in that number, and are just as boisterous as the others. We are slowly learning what we can do in Scratch, the possibilities seem endless!

Advice for 2016

In the last lesson of 2015, my Grade 1 students were asked to write some advice for next year's Grade 1 kids. They took to this task with enthusiasm. We worked on capital letters, full stops, descriptive words and how to give advice. When they were finished they could adjust their font and text colours. It worked well as a reflexive exercise beyond the standard 'recapping on the year'. It makes me so proud to read over these and see how much their writing has improved in just one year! They are so ready for Grade 2.

A selection of advice from our 2015 Grade 1s.

I've been on my summer holidays, relaxing and gathering my thoughts for a new year of teaching IT. I'm looking forward to improving what I do. The most important thing that I think I can teach in the lab is problem solving - what to do when something goes wrong. If I can help the students develop intelligent guesses, they'll cope fine with any computer problem.

Willy the Wizard Conversations

In Grade 1, my students have been reading a number of Anthony Browne's books, including the great Willy the Wizard. A teacher asked for us to find a way to use Willy the Wizard to practice writing conversations. I took a picture of the worksheet that she had found and then inserted it into MS Word. I set the text to be on top of the image and set two columns to cover both speech bubbles. This way my young Grade 1s could work on their Word familiarity as well as get in some literacy practice.

Here are some snapshots of the finished products. It's not often we get to see IT work printed out and so proudly on display in the classroom - it's a delight to see.