The early start classes at James Lane Allen were busy in October and November, creating their very own digital ABC book. Ms. O'Connell's morning and afternoon early start students began their project by making ABC posters, one for each letter of the alphabet. Using the digital camera, each student in the class had their picture made holding one of the letters. They then recorded a sentence about their letter on the computer. For example, "A is for apple." The afternoon class was also recorded singing the ABC song.

The picture and audio files were then added to Microsoft Movie Maker to create a digital ABC book. The movie begins with the picture of each letter and the sentence about that letter being read in the background. After seeing all 26 letters, the pictures then cycle through again in time to the ABC song.

Although the students did not put the actual movie together, they absolutely loved working on the project and seeing and hearing themselves in the final product. Several parents also visited Ms. O'Connell's class to help with the process of making posters, taking pictures, and recording voices. The letter posters have been hung around the room to help students learn the alphabet, and the movie will be available to students during center time as well as being played for the whole class for review.

You may view the movie here. 

Maxwell Elementary students are using a program called Clic in grades 2 through 5 for math enhancement activities in Spanish. Clic is a free program that allows you to create different types of activities such as puzzles, exploration, multiple choice, written answer and others. In the classroom at Maxwell, the program is used with the SMART board where the students are on teams to complete the drills or with the laptops. Some classes also use it to practice math in the computer lab.

If you are interested in using this program you have to first download the Clic program (http://www.xtec.es/recursos/clic/bin/multidisk/clic30en.zip).  Then you can download and add activities from the Clic website (http://www.xtec.es/recursos/clic/eng/act/index.htm) or create your own activities.  It is a Java-based program.  You may never need to create new activities because there are so many available on the web.