Flipgrid - Emoji Story Retells

This past week I worked with a Media Specialist, Mrs. Waters, to teach a class of fourth grade students how to use Flipgrid (free for teachers/students). Since it is Black History Month we used the picture book "Mae Among the Stars" as our retell project. Mrs. Waters read the book, but I also liked this YouTube video, mainly because the words are on the screen. I also enjoyed this Ryan and Craig read aloud. If you have not heard of Ryan and Craig's read alouds you definitely need to check them out...they are hilarious and kids LOVE them.

Photo - https://amzn.to/2GYgR21

Students were tasked with using the tools within Flipgrid to retell the story using between five and ten sentences.

Once Mrs. Waters read the book to students we explored all the tools within Flipgrid to see what could be used to help us with our story retell. The emojis were very popular and we discovered a cool space helmet and career emojis that include multi-colored and gendered astronauts.

Zaria's Flipgrid (featured above) was probably the best executed. She used the blue filter tool to match the wording from the book about feeling "blue and cold". Most children did not finish in enough time. In a 50 minute block we did the reading, we brainstormed whole group a story retell, students were given some time to explore and share what they found in Flipgrid that would help with their retell, and then they recorded (we had several sound issues with the microphone ear buds that Mrs. Waters, her assistant, and I had to troubleshoot).

We got permission to keep Zaria past the related arts block so we could have one finished example to use with the other fourth grade classes.

Flipgrid allows you to download finished videos and Mrs. Waters was able to add it to her morning news show.

If you try this activity, please share the links to finished videos in the comments below or tag me (and Flipgrid) on Twitter.

Comments

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Search This Blog