Techy Tots

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This week we explored technology in two different projects.

While studying families we have been reading a lot of books by the amazingly talented Todd Parr. We love his illustrations and fun simple text so much that we were inspired to create a class family book of our own. First we thought about what our page would look like and sketched and wrote a draft to get our ideas out. Then with the help of Ms. Sharpe and some parent volunteers we headed to the tech lab to create our illustrations using the Paint program. The first grade authors and illustrators got very creative and just like Todd Parr, very colorful! The next day we headed back to the computer lab where we added our text to our illustrations and had time to explore with paint some more. Next we are going to put all of our pages together and add voice thread to really make our book come to life. We can't wait for you to view it when we are ready to publish.

Next, we each made a list of all of the many things that we are thankful for in our lives. After we had made our own list we worked as a team to create a class Wordle with all of the words that we came up with. Wordle is a fun program that will take any text and turn it into a beautiful word cloud. It turns out that we are thankful for many of the same things and can't wait to celebrate them next week with the ones that we love most. You can take a look at the Wordle by clicking on the image above. I have emailed the students the link if they would like to practice creating their own wordle some time.

Just a reminder that the winter months are upon us and that means that we need to have our proper gear ready for recess. Once the snow falls students will need to have boots and snow pants if they want to be able to go off of the blacktop during recess. They should also have a change of shoes to wear when they are in school as well as gloves, hats, mittens and anything else to keep warm and toasty.

Happy Thanksgiving!