Category: Lesson plans

Many Fridays, I report on a wonderful website or project my classes and parents love. This one is teaching architecture to youngers:

Lesson Plan:

Three projects over six weeks and your students will learn about blueprints, room layout, dimensions, and more. Plus, they’ll understand how to think about a three-dimensional object and then spatially lay it out on paper. This is challenging, but fun for first graders.

Spend two weeks on each projects. Incorporate a discussion of spaces, neighborhoods, communities one week. Practice the drawing, then do the final project which students can save and print. Kids will love this unit.

• First, draw a picture in your drawing program of the child’s home. If you don’t already have a class favorite, check this list. Many have architecture tools so show students how to find them. Have kids think about their house, walk through it. They’ll have to think in three dimensions and will soon realize they can’t draw a two-story house. In that case, allow them to pick which rooms they wish to include and concentrate on what’s in the room.

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Here’s the list of Kindergarten websites I use most often during the school year. Notice that many of the headings are links to more websites under that theme:

Animals

Art

1. 1. Coloring Books
   2. Drawing

Coding

Critical Thinking

Digital Citizenship

1. 1. Bullying–a read-along book
   2. Cybersmart Hero
   3. Hector’s World–Cyberbullying

Farms

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Here are fourteen fun Valentine sites to fill those few minutes betwixt and between lessons, projects, bathroom breaks, lunch, and everything else:

1. Apps for Valentine’s Day
2. Drag-and-drop games
3. Google Drawings Magnetic Poetry from Ctrl Alt Achieve
4. Games and puzzles
5. Games and stories
6. ‘I love you’ in languages Afrikaans to Zulu
7. Match
8. Poem generator
9. Puppy jigsaw
10. Rebus game
11. Sudoku
12. Tic-tac-toe
13. Typing
14. Write in a heart

Do you use any I missed? If you’re looking for more, here’s my collection.

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This is one of the most popular lessons I teach to Excel beginners. It is relevant, instantly usable and makes sense from the beginning. Click the images below to enlarge them for viewing.

–from 55 Technology Projects for the Digital Classroom

Copyright ©2023 usna.wordpress.com – All rights reserved.

Before teaching Lesson Plans using Photoshop, be sure to cover the basics with students:

Open Photoshop. Notice the tool bars at the top. These will change depending upon the tool you choose from the left side. These are the crux of Photoshop. We’ll cover about ten of them in fifth grade. The rest will have to wait. The right-hand tools are used independent of the left-hand tools. They are more project oriented.

• Click the File Browser tool (top right-ish). It shows you the folders on your computer. From here, you can select the picture you’d like to edit (or use File-open) (more…)

Over the next few months, we’ll provide a series of lessons on spreadsheet basics you can use in your K-8 classroom. Here are some of the topics we’ll cover:

1. #74: Mastering Excel (for Beginners)
2. #71: Beginning Graphs in MS Excel
3. #70: Create a Timecard in Excel for Grade Two and Up
4. #73: How to Graph in Excel
5. #12: Create Simple Shapes in Excel
6. #75: Tessellations in Excel
7. #72: How to Check Your Math in Excel
8. How to Use Excel to Teach Math Arrays
9. #62: Email from Word (Or PowerPoint or Excel)
10. #79: Excel Turns Data Into Information

Today:

Grade Level: 5th (or whichever grade you are teaching arrays)

Background: None. This is an intro to MS Excel or spreadsheets

Vocabulary: Excel, cell, rows, columns, paint bucket, borders, arrays, resize, formulas

Time: About 30 minutes

Steps:

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Learning computers starts in kindergarten with understanding hardware. This lesson plan (#103 in the lesson plan book noted below) includes three pages. Introduce less with K, more each year until by sixth grade, students are good hardware problem solvers because they understand the basics.

Page 2 is an assessment you can either print out and have students fill in or push out to students to be completed online.

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One of the most popular applications of math is through spreadsheets (like Excel) that make those numbers relevant to everyday life. We’re going to provide a series of lessons on spreadsheet basics you can use in your K-8 classroom. Here are some of the topics we’ll cover:

1. #74: Mastering Excel (for Beginners)
2. #71: Beginning Graphs in MS Excel
3. #70: Create a Timecard in Excel for Grade Two and Up
4. #73: How to Graph in Excel
5. #12: Create Simple Shapes in Excel
6. #75: Tessellations in Excel
7. #72: How to Check Your Math in Excel
8. How to Use Excel to Teach Math Arrays
9. #62: Email from Word (Or PowerPoint or Excel)
10. #79: Excel Turns Data Into Information

Today:

This project (#70 in the collection of #110) hides a spreadsheet’s power behind a template you create and students fill out at home. If they’re older and more familiar with spreadsheets, involve them in creating the template. If the lesson plans are blurry, click on them for a full size alternative.

Note: The example uses Excel, but it works just as well with Google Spreadsheets.

–from 55 Technology Projects for the Digital Classroom

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In honor of Martin Luther King:

The 19-page two-lesson plan bundle to teach about Martin Luther King (click for more information) is Free through Jan. 17, 2023. Lesson plans include:

• • • • an Event Chain of Dr. King’s impact on American history
      • interpreting his words with a visual organizer

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January 4th-9th

the 56-page PDF, “25 Digital Tools for the Classroom”

for free!

“25 Digital Tools for the Classroom” is a thorough discussion on which are the most useful tools in a K-8 classroom, organized by grade level. This includes popular digital tools such as blogs, backchannel devices, vocabulary decoding tools, avatars, digital portfolios, digital note-taking, as well as others you may not have thought of. Here’s what you do:

• Sign up for our newsletter, Weekly Websites, Tech Tips, and Tech Ed News. If you already subscribe, qualify by purchasing one of our resources on the Structured Learning website. Any product, any price qualifies.
• Email us the welcome message or receipt you receive (we’re at askatechteacher at gmail dot com). Make the subject line read, “Please send free ’25 Digital Tools for the Classroom'”.
• We’ll send you the collection.
• If the newsletter doesn’t work for you, there’s an ‘unsubscribe’ at the bottom of each email.

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