Category: Lesson plans

This project is part of a triptych that collaborates with a classroom unit on animals. The first was another diagram, that one to teach animal characteristics.

This one is a great project that mixes the visual with the written. Students loved collaborating to come up with the animal adaptations. Allow them to take ample time surveying the plethora of amazing animal pictures that represent the adaptations they selected. Overall a popular project that teaches a lot. Easily completed in 30 minutes. (more…)

Students create their own tour on Google Earth using locations selected by the classroom teacher. They add the locations to Google Earth, add a fact about it and turn it into a tour.

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There are lots of great online vocabulary websites to help kids learn high-frequency and dolch words. I’ll share five you would enjoy this summer. Maybe you have some to share with the group. (more…)

Photoshop reputation as a photo editor ignores its many other tools that enable you to draw like a pro with a wide variety of brushes, textures, and scintillating extras. This side of Photoshop is perfect for creative projects that tie in with many different classroom lesson plans.

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Google Earth can be used for so many classroom activities. It is a favorite of even my kindergartners. I start by showing them how to pan in and out, drag to move the globe, change the perspective of the earth’s surface, use the built in tour or one I add on Calif. Missions or the solar system. I have fifth graders create a tour that the youngers then watch as a tie in. I also let them type in their address and visit their home, including street view.

Click on pages for a full size alternative. (more…)

Students type a report for their class on one of their units of inquiry (i.e., animals) using MS Word. Use this lesson to introduce MS Word, margins, page breaks, centering, fonts. Show students how to add pictures from the internet (using copy-paste), from the computer (using insert). Takes a few classes, depending upon how long the report is (more…)

Use a first-grade or second-grade story. Show students how to add description to it, setting details, sensory details, characterization, so it sounds more mature and interesting. I use thought bubbles to make it more fun.

Click on them for a full size alternative. Or visit the original post on Ask a Tech Teacher (more…)

Use the Quick Publication template to make a fast cover page for a report, project, etc, in the classroom. Pay attention to layout, grammar, spelling, design.

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Before we get into Photoshop, we’ll start with a program your fifth grader is most likely comfortable with: MS Word. For basic image editing, Word does a pretty good job, so we’ll start with a project using Word’s tools:

• Open a blank document in MS Word. Insert a picture with multiple focal points (see samples).
• Duplicate the image once for each focal point.
• Click one image to activate toolbar.
• Crop each duplicate to show just one of the focal points (more…)

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 and/or offered example. I finally gave up and created my own. (more…)