Ethan used the computer to research what he would like to decorate his room at school with. He researched on fathead.com and decided on a NBA basketball fathead to decorate his room. He was very excited about this and had to do some research to make sure it was the one he wanted.
This week Baylie has been reading the story "Mr. Poppers Penguins" with her language arts teacher. To incorporate background information on penguins Baylie and I used the computer to do research about penguins, where they live, how they get food, and how they take care of their babies. Then, we watched a informational video from the National Geographic website on emperor penguins, which was full of interesting facts about these type of penguins.
Baylie used words from her spelling list to practice typing on the abcya.com website. Using this website she typed 10 of her spelling words and created a word search. Then, Baylie created an acrostic poem using the letters in her name on the Microsoft Word program. She was very creative with the words she chose for the poem and did a nice job typing on the keyboard. Finally, Baylie explored educational activities on the pbskids.org website.
Baylie used the website abcya.com to practice typing her spelling words. She typed ten of her spelling words to make a word search puzzle. Then, she completed the word search puzzle on the computer. Finally, she explored educational computer games on the abcya.com and pbskids.org websites. Baylie did an excellent job using the keyboard to type her spelling words.
We were interrupted in this class, with a school wide activity. When we returned to classwork, Devon was very focused on packing up her office. There was no getting her to focus on computer work, so I assisted her in sorting and packing up her artwork and supplies.
During this class Devon decided on a sound tract for the video, and learned how to apply the sound tract to the stop action video clips she had edited together last week. We found a tutorial video, online, that she watched to learn how to do this and also how to work with the sound tract. The song that she picked was longer than the show, and started with a slow intro that was not good for her show, so she edited the length of the musical piece to fit the length of her claymation show. She picked the style and color of the credit slides at the start and end of the show. After some conversation and thought, she picked a Title for the piece, just before the end of class.
I had planned on finishing the claymation project today, but Devon wanted to work on a photoshop project. She selected an image, and I showed her some advanced tools - including selective color, levels, channel mixer, highlights and shadows, and gradient map. We also worked on the warp, skew, perspective and scale options on the move tool. These are all very advanced Photoshop actions, and Devon absorbed their uses, like a sponge. She also understood the batch process, which allows you to do the same action on many images at once. We both had fun with this class. We can do the claymation tomorrow.
Devon did not address the images we had started working with, as was her homework. So this session, we completed her image organization. We discussed the reasons why one would be best served if they did this organizational practice soon after taking the photos. Devon was amazed how she could not remember the names of some girls she knew at camp. When we had done all that we could, we turned our attention to planning her powerpoint assignment. We decided to make the program around a chronological presentation of her photos, with some additional images from the camp website, to illustrate activities that she could not have her camera, or take photos. We started the powerpoint by selecting a format for the title page. She came up with a title just as our hour came to an end.
