If I Had a Pot of Gold...St. Patrick's Day Activity

Need a fun digital writing prompt for St. Patrick's day? Try this "If I had a pot of Gold" activity.

The fun, and techie part, requires students to take a picture of themselves, use the site remove.bg to remove the background and edit around the face, and then layer it within the hat and beard clipart.

To encourage more writing and detail I made the "pot of gold" cursed so that in order to get what you want you have to do something nice with the some of the gold and tell me what and why. Here are some student samples from a fifth grade class:

I didn't do this with the group I worked with but you can have them add in their Leprechaun name using this name generator I found online.

In the "If I had a pot of gold" template (CLICK HERE TO OPEN) I have an instructional video on the first slide and some "good" and "bad" writing samples (CLICK HERE TO OPEN LINK TO VIDEO ONLY).

IMPORTANT NOTE: You will need to make a copy of both the template AND video if you are assigning to your students via Google Classroom. We restrict students from opening up anything outside our Google domain and most GAFE schools operate the same. So in order to get this activity to them you have to make a copy of both within your domain.

The video is specific to our student and devices here in Beaufort County. You may want to watch it to make sure it matches your devices. We also have the site remove.bg unblocked for students so that may be something you want to check before assigning.

If you have your students complete one I would love to hear how it went. You can comment below or tag me on Twitter @atechcoachlife.

Comments

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.

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21). I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class. We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online). One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom. All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...

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...

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Search This Blog