Quarter 2 is on the loose!

Welcome back! I hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving Break and enjoyed time with family and friends. It such a blessing to reconnect with people that you haven't seen for awhile or even spend quality time with those that you may see on a daily or weekly basis.

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas Break is always jam packed with special concerts, performances, and activities that keep us constantly busy. Here in the lab, we are busy with the following things:

Grade 2 - 3:

Footprints in the Sand ~ This is an online lesson that we are using to help us navigate through sites when we are online. Some of the things that we talked about were scrolling, hot links, bookmarks, going back to the previous page, and what to do when the computer is loading (patience!!). I have posted a link to this activity on this blog. Look for it and have your student lead you through it. They will also be completing an assignment on being a detective on the internet and how to look for information.

Grade 4:

We've gone to the dogs. . . well, kind of. The fourth grade class is learning about the Keynote program and all of the bells and whistles that come with it. This is a great presentation tool, much like Power Point, that will help them in later years. For this project, each student is choosing the theme of the presentation, finding pictures of 10 dogs, and assigning one adjective per dog that describes it. They are having a blast!

Grade 5:

Computer Connections continues to be a great resource for this class and curriculum that I have used from the start of the school year. We have covered things such as the insides of the computer to memory and more. We are currently on storage and our vocabulary words for this week are Primary and Secondary Memory. Fifth grade students are also being introduced to some primary keyboarding skills. I have posted a link to Dance Mat Typing on my blog. This is something that they can do at home as well. Be careful with the volume, the goat's accent can get a little annoying.

Middle School:

Middle School always seems to have a lot of things going on at one time. We currently working on 3 projects, the first being "Mi Familia" which is the project information that I sent home over Thanksgiving Break. All pictures for this project where due on November 30th along with the project requirement sheet signed. Project number 2 deals with Copyright and Fair Use and Citing Sources. We will be discussing the law and how to properly give credit to the people/places they retrieve their information from, focusing on the internet. And last, but not least, our third area of concentration is keyboarding. This will not change for the entire year.

Needless to say, we are all busy in the lab learning and having fun. I will be out on Monday, December 7th attending a Smart Board workshop in St Cloud.