Hit, Scrape, or Shake?
It was loud and chaotic – in the nicest sort of way – as students moved freely from instrument to instrument experimenting to find the best way to play a beautiful sound: hit, scrape, or shake? Each student had an iPad to record their findings. One way to use the iPad with little ones is to have them take pictures and sort them using the PicCollage app. The end result is a sorted image, but no sound. For many reasons, at the beginning of the year, this is an easy way to augment the learning using technology. After a few months, kindergarten students are ready to make a recording and turn pages. Book Creator is the perfect app for my little ones to add sound. In this version of the Hit, Scrape, Shake lesson, I prepared a template using the Book Creator app. Each page of the book had an image of an instrument and three movable words at the top. Students didn’t need to take a picture, they only needed to make a recording, move the correct word to the cloud, and turn to the next page for the next instrument. Once finished, students (with my help) exported their book as a video to Seesaw, the Learning Journal, for their parents and teacher to see.
Show What You Know with your iPad
While learning the Snowman song, students learned how to draw the quarter rest and what it means when we see it.
Sing and Record A New Verse using the iPad
Kindergarten students created their own new verses to “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” and recorded their singing using the iPad.
Ghostly Rhythms with Manipulatives and Technology
A healthy mix of old fashioned manipulatives and a bit of creative technology turned an ordinary October lesson into so much more. After singing and moving to “Pumpkin, Pumpkin Round and Fat,” my students used creepy eyeballs and foam sticks to map out the rhythmic pattern of long and short sounds. As you can see from the video below, students loved touching long, creepy worms and short insects of every kind as they experienced long and short patterns.
Moving to the SMARTBoard, students took turns singing and drawing new long and short patterns by tracing big ghosts and little ghosties. At the next lesson, I airdropped a template created in Explain Everything and students created their own short / long patterns. Using the laser pointer, students recorded their voice as they chanted the new patterns. Finally, kindergarten students were able to actually decode long and short patterns, drawing them over the steady heart beats on their iPads.
In this example, technology doesn’t replace best practices in teaching young children; it enhances and provides an individual account of their understanding. The SMARTBoard and iPads were used seamlessly throughout the unit as a tool for learning and creating. Additionally, my students’ work on their personal iPad was exported as a video to Seesaw, so it was a perfect way to assess individual students as never before.
