Turkey Takes a Vacation

Ms. Tulbure's class loves to be creative. In December, students created fanciful stories about a creative turkey and used technology to take the turkey to another land where he would not become Thanksgiving dinner.

Steps Taken to Complete Turkey and Research

First, students choose a book they read in November, and decorated a turkey to look like the main character. 

photo by Ms. Tulbure

Second, students selected an exotic vacation location for turkey. (If he left America over Thanksgiving break, he would not get eaten.) Some turkeys stayed home.


Third, students researched a vacation destination using reference books and World Book Online.

Photo by Ms. Tulbure

Fourth, students wrote the first draft of our turkey narratives. Students opened up their Google Docs and started typing their story. A link with a writing prompt was provided in Google Classroom. 

photo by Ms. Tulbure

Steps Taken to Complete the Vacation Photos 

First, students were guided in adding the application Google Earth to their GAFE (Google Apps for Education).

Next, students located the country they had researched, and used the man icon to get a street level view. 

Photo by Ms. Tulbure

Then, students took a screen shot of their selected location.

Lastly, students uploaded their photo onto their Google Doc. 

To Bring it all together.....

We used the app Green Screen to superimpose the turkey onto the Google Earth image

. 

Below are the published pieces (more to come soon)

Turkey swims to the Pacific Ocean:

by Belana 

Turkey visits Israel: 

by Amit

 Turkey visits the Grand Canyon:

by Sam

Turkey goes to Scottsdale, Arizona: 

by Tyler

 Turkey jets off to Canada:

by Cameron

Where would your turkey go if he tried to escape Thanksgiving?

Which story did you enjoy and why?

 

Literature Led Technology Fun!

Last week the class completed an author study. 
We read a variety of books by the author, Chris Van Allsburg. 

By Tim Pierce (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

We then compared and contrasted various literary elements.

We looked at the illustrations and the various types of drawings. Some illustrations had color, while others were black and white using pen and paper.

We marveled at the beautiful drawings made by Chris Van Allsburg, and also enjoyed looking out for hidden clues. We often found Fritz, the author's dog, in many of his books either as a character or in the background. We also saw identical images in various books. For example, we saw the train from The Polar Express in Jumanji, or the kitchen from Two Bad Ants in the book Ben's Dream.

After we discussed each story, students picked their favorite one to re-tell and summarize. A summary is a paragraph, re-telling the main events of a story.  Students each worked in their Google Classroom and brainstormed their summary on a Google Doc. Students focused on the main characters (who was the story about), what the main character wanted, or what goal they had (what is happening), what was the main problem, how did the character try to solve the problem, and finally, what was the outcome or the solution to the problem.

See some examples below:

Here students are hard at work writing their summary brainstorm ideas:

All Photos by Ms. Tulbure

Next, students picked a project to show their summary creatively. Students could choose between using an iPad and working on Poplet, Facetalker, or Educreations. 

Below are some examples of Poplet in action:

Students could also use Google Drive and write a summary in their Google Docs or create a presentation using Google Slides. 

Here students are working on Google Docs and Google Slides:

Students could also write their summary interactively using PowToon on their Acer. 

 What fun we had learning both to summarize and also using technology to further our learning and imaginations!

What was your favorite author study project? 

Are there other apps or programs that you would like to try to show your learning?

What was your favorite Chris Van Allsburg book and why?