Use of Our Interactive White Board

I have an interactive white board in my classroom. Sometimes I do a better job of using it than others. I would not describe the current time as a great one. However, we've done a couple of things lately that I like.

I write our morning message on our interactive white board every day. For one thing, it saves a lot of paper (at least in some ways). The kids sign in on it every morning, answering a simple question. One students, our meeting manager, leads the kids in reading the message and then calls students up to circle something (word, letter, upper case letter, hanging letter [like y or g]). Every two weeks I print out our morning messages and send them home with kids to read and share with their parents. We also keep a copy in our classroom library for them to read. The morning messages are something we've read together and most of the kids can read independently.

The other thing we've been doing lately is using Animationish. We've used it to animate high frequency words as a fun way to practice writing them. The idea of change is important in our study of past, present, and future. Yesterday we talked about pictures of a tree near our playground. I took one picture at the start of the year and one last week so that we could talk about how it has changed. We brainstormed other things that change and then we animated a couple of changes. I did the one of the tree as a model. The kids worked together to do the one of the frog. It starts as an egg, then becomes a tadpole, then grows legs, and then becomes a frog.