Montessori Crosswords

In our classrooms, the iPads at first made themselves most useful in our Language Arts programs. This is in large part due to the fact that there are so many apps for word building, phonics review, and letter sounds.

Montessori Crosswords has made it into our rotation this year as one of the more promising apps for word building and review.

This app gives a picture clue and speaks a word that the student must spell by dragging and dropping the letters into a traditional crossword layout.  Once a puzzle is successfully solved, the student gets to interact with bubbles, stars, spirals or some other feature.  One of the most wonderful things about this app is the depth of the settings feature.  This app allows for focusing on one sound - and those choices are fairly extensive including consonants, long vowels, short vowels, blends, word endings, etc.

We use this app as a regular reinforcement during our language arts times.  This week for example our students focused on the ow sound as in couch and cow.  After conversation and exploration about these sounds in small groups, the students used letter cubes to build words and then created sentences incorporating each type of word.  Once they finished with their sentences they worked on Crosswords on the iPads targeting those types of words.


Unfortunately, no apps are perfect.  With Crosswords the challenge is sometimes the audio.  For many of our children, the audio can be difficult to understand.  The "L" and the "N" sound too similar.  On the other hand, the voice will pronounce the blends as blends, so if you tap on an empty square to figure out which letter you need, she'll highlight both squares to show that it is a blend.  This is true in words such as black in which she blends the "ck" and in snail in which she blends "ai."  We often use this app with the sound off and have the kids say the word that they see in the picture clue out loud in order to figure it out. 

I do wish there was a puzzle choice that used the sight word list and that there were more words in all of the focus on one sound selections....

What I like:
* vowels are one color and consonants are another color
* can choose to work on cvc words or individual vowels or consonants or blends
* it's not too over-praising

What I'd like to change:
* the sounds of the voice in the app can be a little difficult to understand
* silent letter sounds throw off our beginning spellers (knife, knit, etc)
* it would be nice if there was a two word puzzle should build on a specific angle - ie. the double consonant or the short vowel

How many ways can we tell a story?

In our class we have been working on finding different ways to tell a story. We began by reading some great stories about kids our age and having the students write a story with paper and pencil. The students reflected on their work. Does it have a beginning? Is there a middle? How does it end?

Our next stories were created solely with an art app. Most of the students used Draw Free.

The students narrated their stories to a partner. The students really enjoyed this project and created elaborately detailed tales to accompany their illustrations.

This story picture told the story of a boy who can walk under water!

Next, the students wrote with pencil and paper about one classroom job. Once they finished the paper and pencil version of their non-fiction "story," they went to Book Creator and created an iBook about the very same job. They were able to use the camera to take photos, an art app to draw illustrations, the keyboard option to type text, and the voice recorder to narrate these books.
This book was created to explain the Door Monitor job.

This week, we took story telling to the movies!
We talked about movies that are filmed and those that can be created by a series of photos. Using iStopMotion, we have made "A Day in the Life of KX."


To begin, I taped an iPad easel to a bookshelf and set it up. I showed the first student how to operate the app. I gave her some basic suggestions: tap the shutter button lightly, try not to move the iPad, check first to make sure it is lined up, etc. She took the first few frames and then taught the next student. We continued this throughout the day. Everyone had a turn to be the film director and everyone had a turn to be the cameraman.

Before we began, we shared what this story might look like on paper: We arrive at school. We have gathering. We have snack. We do Book Club. We go to lunch. etc. Not a very thrilling story. However, in this new format, the story provides details and information that the written story did not.




What I like about this app:
*kindergarteners can do it
*students get a chance to practice "teaching" something
*students get to experience different types of storytelling
*this is fun!

Book Creator

These past few weeks have been all about Book Creator in the classroom...

Book Creator is a wonderful and student friendly app for creating books with audio.

Last week my students shared their thoughts about Romare Bearden's artwork Home to Ithaca using the See Think Wonder Thinking Routine (we love Project Zero Making Thinking Visible - Thinking Routines). After studying the artwork, we first discussed what we See (a boat, water, trees, a person). Then we tackled what we Think (this might be Odysseus, the shield shapes might be very old, the person might be a man). Finally we shared what this art made us wonder (are any of the buildings a fortress, is the boat coming or going, did this village really exist).

Normally, our students illustrate their own version of the art and through shared writing, we note what everyone has shared.

Last week, we added an extra step.... The students photographed their illustration and we created a See Think Wonder book where everyone had a page with an illustration, their photo, and then an audio recording of their contributions. (a few pages from the book are below)





This week we went further. For the writing task the students each picked a class "job." Yesterday they wrote simple, step by step instructions for the job. Then they picked up an iPad and took two pictures around the room that best demonstrated the job. Today the students each started their iBook instruction manual. With very little demonstration the kindergarteners quickly picked up the basics. The only typing they most did was on the cover page where they added the book title and their name as author. Then they selected photos for the two pages which would help explain their job from start to finish. Some students found they wanted to use a picture that we hadn't taken so they slipped into Draw Free and created what they wanted - then slipped back to their book and inserted the drawing. A couple of kids staged new photos to insert into their book as they found some step needed alternate explanation. (a student example for the Door Holder job is below - including a drawing that illustrates where in the line the Door Holder should stand)


This second student book was created for the Snack Helper job - using photos and three audio recordings that break the job down into three steps.



The highlight was recording the audio. The students quickly realized that the best audio was captured when they spoke loud and clear. (Great practice for articulating thinking, creating complete sentences, and speaking with emotion) Some students recorded their audio all at one time - under one "audio button" and some made many buttons so that they could record their job step by step.

What I'd like to change.... I would like the add a page feature to either ask for confirmation before adding the page or that it be located away from the edge of the page. The kids added many extra blank pages as their finger hit the button while they were trying to resize or move a photo. I also would like the option of selecting an alpha order keyboard in addition to the qwerty.

Criteria for app Selection

In a nutshell:

We look for three basic qualities in an app (listen up app developers):

*must do more than one thing
*needs to have a settings option so that we can change/personalize it
*should not be over congratulatory (no wild applause/cheers)


Beyond that - we are looking for apps with a dynamic quality so that creativity, thinking, and problem solving come into play. We don't want to apply technology simply for the sake of applying technology.