Category: 3rd Grade
#29: A Slideshow for Third Graders
By fourth grade, my students are so good at PowerPoint, I don’t even teach it in fifth grade (I move on to Photoshop). They’ve learned enough to get them through school. Here’s how I do that: (more…)
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50 Websites About Animals
Here are 50 animal websites for grades K-5, everything from Dinosaurs to the wildly popular Wolfquest (click here for updates):
- 3D Toad—3D science study
- Adaptations—game
- Animal Adaptations
- Animal games
- Animal Games II
- Animal games II
- Animal Games III
- Animal Habitats
- Animal homes
- Animal homes
- Animal Homes II
- Animal Homes III
- Animal puzzle games–cool
- Animals
- Animals—San Diego Zoo Videos
- Barnaby and Bellinda Bear
- Bembo’s Zoo
- Build a habitat
- Build a habitat II
- Butterfies and habitats
- Classify animals
- Cockroach—virtual
- Dino collection
- Dino Fossils then and now
- Dino Games
- Dino Games II
- Dinosaurs
- Dinosaurs II
- Dinosaurs IV
- Dinosaurs V
- Dinosaurs VI
- Endangered species collection
- Food chain
- Food Chains
- Frog habitat
- Google Earth—African Animals
- Google Earth—endangered animals
- Habitat Game
- Habitats—create one
- Habitats—match them
- Life Cycles
- Life—the Game–colorful
- Ocean Currents—video from NASA
- Ocean Safari
- Ocean Tracks
- Video Safari
- Virtual Cockroach
- Virtual Farm
- Virtual Zoo
- Wolfquest—simulation–DL
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LOTS of Resources for Kids’ Online Research
Here are quick, safe spots to send students for research (click here for updates to the list):
- CoolKidFacts–kid-friendly videos, pictures, info, and quizzes–all 100% suitable for children
- Dimensions–academic research geared for college-level
- Fact Monster–help with homework and facts
- Google Earth Timelapse–what changes to the planet over time
- Google Trends–what’s trending in searches
- History Channel–great speeches
- How Stuff Works–the gold standard in explaining stuff to kids
- Info Please–events cataloged year-by-year
- National Geographic for Kids
- Ngram Viewer–analyzes all words in all books on Google Books
- TagGalaxy–search using a cloud
- Wild Wordsmyth–picture dictionary for kids
- World Book–requires membership
Citing Resources
Kids Search Engines
How to Research
- A Google A Day
- How to Search on Google
- Power Searching (with Google)
- Teaching students to search/research
- Internet Search and Research–a lesson plan for K-8
Lesson Plans
Resources/Research
- BrainPOP–Bring learning to your fingertips™ with the BrainPOP® Featured Movie app
- Kids Picture Dictionary
- Primary Source Documents
- SparkVue–collect and display live data from iPhone etc to the iPad
- Talk to Books–research your topic based on books
- TED app–TED’s official app presents talks from some of the world’s most fascinating people
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Three Projects to Kick Off the Holidays
Click to enlarge lesson plan
A Holiday Calendar
Kids love making this calendar. They get to talk about their upcoming vacations and hear what their friends are doing. It’s simple enough for third grade with advanced tools that satisfy a fifth graders growing intellect.
A Holiday Newsletter
Have students collaborate on a newsletter for a classroom unit of inquiry or a theme (colonies, animals, etc). Pick a template. Add text and pictures. Pay attention to layout details. Allow several class periods to complete
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#20: A Holiday Card in a Drawing Program (like KidPix)
Create a holiday card for Thanksgiving or Christmas in KidPix or another drawing program and reinforce early writing skills while teaching mouse skills, toolbars and tool use: (more…)
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12 Projects to Teach Digital Citizenship–by Grade
Education has changed. No longer is it contained within four classroom walls or the physical site of a school building. Students aren’t confined by the eight hours between school bells or the struggling budget of an underfunded program. Now, education can be found anywhere — teaming up with students in Kenya, Skyping with an author in Sweden, or chatting with an astrophysicist on the International Space Station. Students can use Google Earth to take a virtual tour of a zoo or a blog to collaborate on class research. Learning has no temporal or geographic borders and is available wherever students and teachers find an Internet connection. This vast landscape of resources is offered digitally, often free, but to take that cerebral trek through the online world, children must know how to do it safely, securely, and responsibly. This used to mean limiting access to the Internet, blocking websites, and layering rules upon rules hoping (vainly) to discourage students from using an infinite and fascinating resource. It didn’t work. Best practices now suggest that instead of cocooning students, we teach them to be good digital citizens, confident and competent. Here are eleven projects to teach kids authentically, blended with your regular lessons, the often complicated topic of becoming good digital citizens, knowledgeable about their responsibilities in an Internet world. (more…)
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A Holiday Easter Story in Word for Grades 2-7
Reinforce fiction writing–characters, plot, setting, climax–with a short story in MS Word or another word processing tool. Then use color, borders, and pictures to enhance the words. Click the images below for larger sizes. Designed for grades 2-7: (more…)
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#12: Create Simple Shapes in Excel
What’s the first thing you think of when I say, Excel? Numbers, right–turning data into information. That is Excel’s ‘killer app’, but the ingenious human brain has come up with another striking use for Excel: Drawing. I spent a long time trying to find a lesson that taught drawing in Excel, finally gave up and created my own” (more…)
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35 Resources for Read Across America Day
Many people in the United States, particularly students, parents and teachers, join forces on Read Across America Day, annually held on March 2nd to coincide with the birthday of Dr. Seuss. Let’s celebrate with this take-off of his writing style, but about technology, reprinted with permission of Gene Zigler at Cornell University:
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report. If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash! If the label on the cable on the table at your house, says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, but your packets want to tunnel on another protocol, that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, and you screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse, then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, 'cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang! When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk, and the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk, then you have to flash your memory, and you'll want to RAM your ROM. Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom. Copyright © Gene Ziegler Email: [email protected] --reprinted with permission © 6-28-09
Here are thirteen great reading websites for students K-5: (more…)
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Tech Tip #25: My Keyboard Doesn’t Work
As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!
You sit down to type, start in on that long project with an imminent deadline, and nothing happens. The cursor blinks… and blinks… and blinks… but goes nowhere.
What do you do?
Before you buy a new keyboard, try a few things:
- Is the keyboard’s power light on? If it is, check your screen. Is there something that’s preventing you from typing? Maybe a dialogue box that wants an answer? If the light isn’t on, continue down this list
- Check the plugs. Maybe the cord that connects the keyboard to the computer is loose or fell out.
- Reboot. Sometimes the stuff in the computer’s boot-up sequence that makes the keyboard work gets lost. Restart your computer so it can re-establish itself.
- Do you eat at your keyboard? Does anyone? I say this next solution hesitantly: Bang on the key. Sometimes keys get food between them. If that doesn’t work, turn the keyboard over and see what falls out.
If none of those work, here are some pretty good suggestions from ChatGPT:
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