activities0809



**Indicates "Featured Activity"**

Please visit the [|Activities Discussion] area if you have questions or comments about any of the activities below.  
 * = **Winter Song Video**

||= **Gingerbread House Coordinate Graphing** ||= **Holiday Polling & Graphing** ||= **Holiday Cards** ||= **How The Grinch Stole Christmas** || Students will create a winter picture using any available drawing program such as Microsoft Paint, KidPix, TuxPaint, Kerpoof. The pictures should be saved as JPGs for use in the video. Students will then be recorded singing a Winter themed song such as //Jingle Bells// or //Winter Wonderland// using an available tool such as Audacity or GarageBand. The exported pictures and recorded song will be combined by the teacher to create a Winter Song Video using available tools such as Animoto,iMovie, Movie Maker, MyPlick.com, Smilebox, One True Media, etc. || //__Description__// Students will use a template to create a Gingerbread House in Excel. Students will also add clip art of a gingerbread man. __//Files//__ [|Gingerbread House Template]
 * __//Description//__

[|Gingerbread House Key]

[|Student Worksheet]

[|Example] || __//Description//__ Students will respond to one or more of our **Winter Wonderland Holiday Polls** __//Extension//__ Students can download the data and use a graphing program or tool to create graphs of the polling data. All data will be compiled and available on the wiki. Polls will close on December 10th! || //__Description__// Students will create Holiday Cards using Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, any available drawing tool or even any multimedia tool. Have the students design the perfect "card" from your class. For example, have one computer in the lab set up in a drawing program and have each student add something to the drawing or message. Or, have each student create their own card and vote for the one to send (or post) to the other classes or send (or post) them all. Classes can choose to actually mail cards to participating classes or can post their //cards// on the wiki on our **Holiday Cards** page. If you wish to mail cards to others, you will need to provide your school address. The addresses will only be available to schools participating in the mail Holiday Card exchange. Registration for the regular mail card exchange closes on December 10th but you can always post a card online.//If you will be participating in the mail exchange, you will need to budget for the mailing costs for mailing your card(s) to up to 20 schools.// __//Files//__ [|Google Docs Video Christmas Card Template] [|Google Docs Pass It Around Birthday Blue Template] (change the colors, etc. to make this a holiday card //__Extensions__// Map where you in the world your cards are going either on an actual map or virtually using Google Earth or Google Maps. || Students will read or watch //How The Grinch Stole Christmas//. They will then create a picture illustrating what they love about Christmas or about their best Christmas ever. The teacher will then upload the pictures to a VoiceThread and the students will narrate their pictures as a "letter" to the Grinch about why he shouldn't steal Christmas. [|How the Grinch Stole Christmas on YouTube] (1966 version in 3 parts) ||  in Winter** ||= **Penguin Glyph** ||= **Penguin Math Book** ||= <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**Winter Poem or Book Talk** ||= <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**Snowflake Bentley** || Students will create a movie using National Geographic's Wildlife Film Maker. The movie has to be made in one session so plan what animals to use and captions to write on a planning sheet. __//Resources//__ [|Film Maker] [|Planning Sheet]
 * = <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**Animals
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">//__Description__//


 * WARNING-At the moment the Film Maker site is not working. The movies will not save. So try it first.**

As an alternative you could make a class movie using iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. Children could draw an animal or find a photograph from Creative Commons on the internet and insert it into the movie and write a sentence or two about the animal in winter. Each child could do one slide and they'd be combined into a movie. || <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">//__Description__// Students will create a penguin glyph in PowerPoint using a template and legend. Students could also research facts about penguins and type it below their glyph. __//Files//__ [|Glyph Template] [|Glyph Legend] || <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__//Description//__ Students will use PowerPoint to create a Mini Math Book with a Penguin Theme. This activity will take take more than one 25-30 minute class period to complete and print. To create the mini books, print the presentation as handouts with 6 slides per page. The students or teacher can then trim the pages and staple them together to make a book. To model this activity for students, download the template and modify it slightly to show students how to use PowerPoint to create their Penguin Math Book. This will show them what they need to do but not give them the answers to the math problems in the Penguin Math Book. __//Files//__ [|PenguinMath-Kindergarten.ppt] [|PenguinMath-Grade1.ppt] [|PenguinMath-Grade2.ppt] [|PenguinMath-Grade3.ppt] || <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">//__Description__// Students will write a winter themed poem (winter, snowflakes, snow, etc.) and illustrate it to create a VoiceThread. //__Files__// [|Book Talk Form] || <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">//__Description__// After listening to the book //Snowflake Bentley// by Jacqueline Briggs Martin students will complete a Kidspiration template timeline putting major life events in order. As an alternate to Kidspiration, students could complete the timeline in PowerPoint. And/or students will use a paint program to draw a detailed snowflake. Cinquain poems could be added to the snowflake pictures. Pictures could be saved as JPEGS and turned into a slideshow on Animoto. //__Files__// [|Wilson Bentley2.kid] [|SnowflakeBentley.ppt]

Example of finished time line: [|Wilson_Bentley_pic.jpg] || <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"> I Love** ||= <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**Virtual Valentine's Greetings** ||= <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**Conversation Hearts Graphing** ||= <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**Candy Heart Sentences / Poems** ||= <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**If My Heart Had...** || Students will create a picture in PowerPoint or Kidspiration or KidPix of things they love. Students will insert clip art into graphic organizer and also include captions. Files can then be exported as JPEGS and into a slide show or VoiceThread to be narrated. __//Files//__ [|ThingsILove.ppt] [|Kidspiration template] || <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__//Description//__ Students in the class will create a Voki (one Voki per class) at Voki.com and record or type a Valentine's Day message for all of the other classes participating in the Winter Wonderland Project. The completed Voki will be posted on the Winter Wonderland Wiki on **our Virtual Valentine's page.**
 * = <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">**Things
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__//Description//__

Note: Students cannot register for an account at Voki.com until they are at least 13 years old. This project should be completed without registering or under the teacher's account. || <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__//Description//__ Each student (or student pair) will get a box of conversation hearts. They will open and line these up on a sheet of paper by color to create a bar graph on the paper. They will then count each color and record each color total in the Conversation Hearts Graph in Excel or other spreadsheet program or online tool. They will compare their real conversation hearts graph on paper to the one created in Excel or other spreadsheet program or online tool. //__Files__// [|ConversationHeartCountSheet.pdf] [|ConversationHeartsGraph.xls] //__Supplies Needed__// One box of Conversation Hearts per student or student pair. //__Extensions__// Compile results for whole class into one spreadsheet to calculate the averages for the class. Visit the [|Necco site] to learn the history of the Conversation Heart and see how they were made and even play a Valentine Message Game. || <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">//__Description__// Students will create sentences or short poems using candy hearts which could be created in a drawing program or by using the [|ACME Heart Maker]. The Heart Maker only allows 8 letters (in 2 lines of 4) per heart so students will need to get creative in what they put on their hearts. Also, students should be supervised when using the Heart Maker and should not go to the see recent hearts link due to possible inappropriate content. The sentences or poem could be created in Word, Google Docs, Powerpoint (so they could be exported as an image) or even Paint. This would allow the students to combine actual text with the hearts they have created for longer words. Once the sentences or poems are complete they could be saved as images and added to the wiki. || <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">__//Description//__ Students will complete the Kidspiration activity "If my Heart had..." (e.g. If my heart had hands it would feel...).Students will type a sentence telling what their heart would see, say, feel, and hear if it had those senses. Save pictures as jpegs and post as slideshow or VoiceThread on the wiki. __//Files// [|If my Heart had... Kidspiration Template]__ [|If my Heart had... JPEG] ||