edna.edu.au

Guiness Book of World Records

Guiness Book of World Records Day was on Friday so we celebrated by having a record smashing competition.

Here are the links I found useful:

• Press Release
  
• Activity Ideas - we did activities like balancing spoons on the face, flipping coins, leapfrog, forward rolls, most pushups,
  
• Also cool to check out - longest bicycle, tallest rideable motorbike, car balanced on head,
  

Tags: activities art fun games
Posted at 09:06PM Nov 16, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Mini Science Fair Part 1

Day 1 - Water

Dancing Raisons (video)

Step 1: Fill glass with Lemonade

Step 2: Add raisons to glass

Step 3: Wait

Milky swirls

Step 1: Add a layer of milk to a tray

Step 2: Put small drops of food colouring in the milk

Step 3: Add a small drop of detergent on each drop of food colouring

Zoom Vehicle

Step 1: String fishing wire between two chairs

Step 2: Blow up a balloon

Step 3: Sticky tape a length of straw to the balloon

Step 4: Decorate the balloon

Step 5: Release balloon and watch it fly

Marshmallow towers

Step 1: Use marshmallows to build a tower

Step 2: Find tallest tower

Step 3: Eat marshmallows

Other links

• Surfing Scientist
• Experimentals 
• Try Science
• PBS Zoom Sci
• Discover Science
  

Tags: talking and listening experiments games science exploration activities fun
Posted at 09:06PM Nov 16, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Fun projects with a technology twist

Lately I have seen a couple of great examples of how to integrate technology with students in practical ways.  How we keep this and pass the knowledge around - mostly through twitter is almost as interesting as the projects themselves.

• I have been working on documenting procedures visually using cooking projects like Nonna and iMovie.
  
• Stephen Drummer is teaching his kids about the 16 Habits of Mind by getting them to blog about a burger.  Check out his blog at BurgerTeach.
  
• Jenny Luca's project is 25 Days to Make a Difference
  
• Tom Barrett (UK) has been working on visual instructions with how to fold a t-shirt in 2 seconds.
• And of course my mum using Wordle to come up key words for learning themes.
  

It would be great to see how you are integrating technology into the curriculum.  Particularly if you're a primary school teacher so I can steal your ideas :).

Tags: instructions fun showme technology literacy projects science teaching ideas
Posted at 05:31PM Oct 15, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[2]

Consequences lesson using GoAnimate

I made this animation using GoAnimate in about 20 minutes.  It's a fun, simple way to provide an alternative method of communicating ideas.   This should work in pretty nicely with our learning to accept consequences for actions unit.

Things to remember:

• The screen demo on the mainpage is good and give a good overview of features and how to use them and it has pretty exciting music
  
• If you want to add movement to an object you need to do it before you move it to the character
• There are some slightly undesirable actions but I think this can be managed through a quick laugh and letting the kids know it's not appropriate for the work we are doing at the moment
  

Tags: literacy teachingideas showme socialskills fun interesting technology tips
Posted at 02:40PM Oct 10, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Happy Snaps - GBPS

In preparation for the holiday we will look at some fun useful web services to share your photos and movies.  Including:

• Upload and sharing photos using Flickr
• Making a short movie in Movie Maker
• Anyone who is interested can stay and I'll show you how to publish your movies online
  

Tags: technology sharing photos gathering fun
Posted at 08:44PM Jun 29, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Online Visual Thesaurus

The Thesaurus has always been really important in the classroom.  I believe it's becoming increasingly important to understand the meaning of words and the connections between words.  Understanding the connections between words enables you to help you reader make connnections.  It's also useful when searching for information, having a range of words that can be used to try to locate resources you require is very important.  Increasingly it's also important to understand the subtle differences in those words.

That is where a tool such as Visual Thesaurus is really useful.  It provides a visual map of words that relate to a word you type into the search bar.   You can then segment the words by the type of word eg nouns, verbs, adverbs etc.  You can also launch an internet search based on words directly from the map.  It also has a limited selection of lesson plans.  Depending on the word the results returned may be challenging for the primary school classroom.  This product does have an annual subscription of about $20 a year.

Other Thesaurus Resources

There are a number of other useful resources that can help increase students vocabularly and improve word usage.

• Rhyme Poetry - This provide words that are related, rhyming or connected by a number of other categories.
• Thesaurus Game - The students really enjoyed playing this game.  We put it up on the projector and they raced to figure out the words the quickest.
• Visuwords.com - This is a free application similar to Visual Thesaurus but without some of the features.  Particularly you cannot click on a word to continue exploring similar words.
  

Something to subcribe to:

• Grammar Girl - Quick grammar tips, usually interesting and useful, with links to other resources.
  

Tags: onlinetools language primary fun literacy showme
Posted at 03:05PM Jun 29, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  |