Tricky Rectangle Shapes

Drawing rectangles of a particular size proved to be quite tricky for the children because they did not realise that once you took you finger off the shape you could not change its size.  Some quickly realised the problem, adjusted their drawings and moved on to doing lines and locking down all the shapes while others needed quite a bit of practice to get four rectangles on their page.

As all the children had not completed the task before morning tea, I let them complete this as a reading activity.  They were very excited to be able to continue and the children supported each other to get as far as having the rectangles and lines in place.  The children love seeing their work on the apple TV and sharing it with others.

One left hander was having trouble drawing lines so Mrs George reversed his tool bar and solved that problem.

The children are having so much fun practising their new skills!  For Inquiry we leant to add a new page after drawing ourselves in school uniform so that we could draw our pets.

"Can I do Reading Activities on my iPad??!!"

Today I started to do reading activities on the ipads with two groups. Previously we had just been practicing our skills on simple reading tasks. I had downloaded two sequencing activities that required the children to go into their reading folder, find the activity and complete them with support. They were able to locate and open the activities quickly. They were so excited with what they found. "This is from our book. Look. Here are some words like our book!" They checked each others iPads to see if they all had the same and worked as a team to sequence the sentences. When one had the fullstops left and didn't know what to do with them the others helped her by saying they were the fullstops and they were at the end of the sentence. They watched as she slid them into place. "Can we do it again?" they wanted to know.

Other classmates came to look at what they were doing and are now eagerly awaiting their turn for "iPad Reading Activities".

Reading, Writing and Maths too.

This week we have been using our iPads to practise the additional skills of locking and making lines that Mrs George taught us as well as revisiting the other skills .  The children have enjoyed seeing that the skills that they have been learning can be used in the different curriculum areas of literacy and numeracy and are not just for taking photos.  Even those children who were reluctant to "push buttons" incase something went wrong are becoming more confident in working with Explain Everything.  Others are becoming quite confident in quickly going through the sequence of steps to achieve the desired outcome.

Solo Taxonomy Model Tasks

 Our group looked at how we could use this model to gain higher cognitive engagement in reading activities.

We chose to make two generic templates that could be used with different books at different levels with scaffolding.  The first thinking area was "describing".  This template could be used used either by the children recording their answer orally or writing their ideas.

The second area we looked at was to compare and contrast.  We chose two interlocking circles into which the children could move photos from the text to compare an aspect of the story.  Older children could use words from the text and see what would fall within both groups.  They could record their reasons orally.