We have been working hard creating our Snowman books on the iPad! We have the first few finished projects to share with you! We hope you enjoy reading and viewing them as much as we have enjoyed creating them!
The initial sparks for the projects are the amazing snowmen that were created at home by the students with their families!
They are fabulous! To set the stage, we read the story The Snowman by Lois Elbert. It is a great story about how a family saves up a variety of materials to decorate their snowmen.
I sent home the template with the children and several weeks later these wonderful snowmen returned to our classroom!
Then we started to compile a book on the iPads about the snowmen. The first page of the book contains a photograph taken on the iPad of their snowmen.
The children opened a project on the app Explain Everything and imported the picture of their snowman from the camera roll. Then they added the title and their name using the text feature.
The children created an additional four pages to their books.
On one page. they had to draw a snowman and then label the snowman using the text feature.
We made one page about what they thought their snowman might like to eat. They had to draw the plate with the items on the plate and label it once again.
The new feature to our snowmen books this year is on the fourth page! It is a new favorite of mine! The Explain Everything app allows you to record every stroke you make as you draw it and narrate your drawing as you build your picture. I thought it would be interesting to have the children describe or teach how to build a snowman. I think you will really enjoy them. I know I can’t watch them without smiling!
The last page is, of course, about the author! The children had to draw a picture of themselves and then add a few sentences about themselves.
The final step was to create a script for the first page describing the snowman. The children had to complete a few sentences describing their snowman and their favorite parts of the project!
Then we had to have the children record their script on the first page of their book as well as adding a comment or reading their work on each of the pages of their book. Then we saved the book to the camera roll as a video within the Explain Everything app. Love, love, love this app!
Then I was able to upload the video on the camera roll to Youtube and import it into the blog so that you can see it. I think I will also create a QR code for the video when we have completed them. You know you have a group of students who love technology when they ask you to turn everything into a QR code!