Becky Perkins

Origami Project
My student has decided to make a video journal on how to make various origami projects. He uses SeeSaw to share his videos with the class.

My students have been using Story Bird to write. They love the illustrations available to choose from to use either as inspirations to write, or to illustrate an existing story idea. Now if only I could get them to put capital letters at the beginnings of all their sentences...

We definitely need to work on typing skills. I have found the hunting and pecking makes them completely forget that they need to capitalize the words at the beginning of sentences.

I would like to say, we are already there, that we are creating, inventing, building, imagining and inspiring to be.... But, we aren't quite there yet. I am impressed with the ideas my kids have come up with. Overall this year I had a lot less blank stares. It seems I have a class of builders this year, which is very exciting.

Collaboration ( OMG you're just as techie as me!)
Gamification (Minecraft crafted my mind)
Inquiry (did you have a question?)
Frameworks (I can get those at Michael's right?)
Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (I was into cephalopods before they were cool)
Food ( I think I gained 10 pounds this week)
Gazebo ( what gazebo)
If This Then That! (No explanation needed)
Projectiles are exceptional for project based learning
Folding pizza boxes is an art form.

3 Things I Found Out:

My alarm clock still works...
I can function of 3 hours of sleep...
Brett and Ashley and I are still extremely rowdy , and awesome...

2 Interesting Things:

If This Then That...
Me

1 Question I still have:

What was Sean talking about?

Whaaaa! Sweet ifttt.com is wicked AWESOME SAUCE!

IF THIS, THEN THAT

A group of my students were very excited about landforms. They illustrated the landforms and gave a brief description of each.  They even added a quiz at the end of the book.

Book Creator for iPad - Book Creator For iPad

Sketches - Sketches

Stop Motion - Stop Motion

Green Screen - Green Screen

iMovie - iMovie

Comic Touch 2 - Comic Touch 2

BookCreate has become one of my favorite apps. My students love it and it is very easy to use.  Most of my Stop Motion groups used it to document their research which was then added to their videos.  Three other groups decided to create books about topics that interested them.

One of my students is into art. He likes to draw, a lot. He created a picture book, and did all his drawings using Sketches.  He is working on creating a story to go with the art.

Several students chose to do a stop motion video on various subjects. They also used a variety of materials to create there stop motion videos.

Last quarter one group of students created a stop motion claymation video.  A group of students thought about doing the same, but their video was going to demonstrate the how the water cycle works.  Clay and the water cycle ended up being difficult to manage.  They ended up doing digital drawings using Sketches on the iPad.  In the end their video turned out great.



Speaking of cycles, a group of students decided they wanted to create a stop motion video, showing the life cycle of a frog.  They created all of the pieces they needed to show the life cycle with construction paper.  Then they laid everything out in stages and took pictures as the went.


The last group who used stop motion wanted to learn more about dinosaurs.  They researched various dinosaurs and the ages in which they lived.  They then created a skit with toy dinosaurs.

The second quarter attempts at Genius Hour, were much more successful. So much so, that I am breaking down the projects into individual posts.

The Bot



A group of my kids said, "Ms. Perkins, we want to make a robot." That's how it starts. They decide what interests them, and then they have to figure out how to do it.  In this case, the original idea was to make a beetle bot. It is something much bigger than what we ended up making.  Due to the lack of resources available, we ended up missing a few key components to make the beetle bot come together. We did however stumble across a video of these little bristle bots.  (They remind me a lot of those little hex bugs.)




So what did they learn from this? Well they learned a lot about circuits. They also learned about motors and switches.  There were several structural problems with the original design, and they had to brainstorm solutions to solve those problems.