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Saturday, February 10, 2018

Bring the Rainforest Home

Hello!

Well the season's have begun to change and at least for this week we are having warm spring weather in Virginia. Next week could be totally different but for now we are loving spending time on our outside porch.

Last year, I shared one of my favorite units to teach about: the rainforest. You can read my original blog here. This year we added an additional technology piece to our unit.

This years lessons were foiled slightly with a baby at home who kept getting sick. In just 6 weeks we had an ear infection and pink eye, stomach bug, and the flu- oh and a molar emerging. Just what all mommy's want right?

Just like last year, we researched a rainforest animal and drew it out. The children used their iPads and really focused on the details. This year the children spent so long drawing and painting their animals that we did not have time to do two animals.

Once we had finished our pictures, the children wrote facts that they had found interesting about the rainforest. Many of the children chose to write about the different layers of the rainforest. This is a huge part of our unit.

The last part and probably my most favorite part was turning our writing into a Chatterpix videos. If you haven't used Chatterpix before it allows the creator to turn a photo or picture into a talking video. During one lesson, I taught the children how to use the app or rather one of our classmates showed me how to do it and answered the other students questions. Ok, it wasn't that bad, but he did know how to do more things than I did on the app.

Next, the children took a picture of their painted animal, drew on the mouth using Chatterpix, and recorded their animals reading their rainforest facts. Next, I uploaded them to our class dropbox and then used a QR creator to make a QR code for each child's video. We hung the QR codes up with the children's writing so our parents can scan the code and see the video. Check out our final display.

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