Two fourth grade classes at Cassidy Elementary and the Academy at Lexington have recently been studying about the regions of Kentucky.  As a culmination to their unit of study, these classes created websites to publish some of the information they had learned about Kentucky.

Mrs. Cook’s 4^th grade class at Cassidy worked in small groups to research information about a particular region they were assigned.  Each group had to find out about the geography, history, economy, natural resources and life in the 21^st century in that region using books and online resources.  Using FrontPage, the groups then worked together to add their information to the class’s web page on the Regions of Kentucky.  The goal of the site was to create a resource for future 4^th grade students when they begin their studies of Kentucky. See what a great job they have done by visiting their web page.

Mrs. Ackerman’s 4^th grade resource class has also been studying the regions and areas of Kentucky.  For their project, each student in the class chose a region or city in Kentucky to investigate.  Then they wrote a paragraph describing their area and drew a picture to illustrate their part of Kentucky.  The students used the school’s laptops to type up their information in FrontPage.  Finally, we took a digital picture of their hand-drawn picture and added that to their individual page.  By applying a theme to the page, the students were able to see a very polished finished project that displayed their hard work to the world. Check out the hard work of these students by visiting Mrs. Ackerman’s web page. 

Other fourth grade students across the district and state are using the forums to study Kentucky's regions.  Read about it in this month's Connections.

Ms. Davis' class at Meadowthorpe Elementary is studying the Branches of Government. They used "Ben's Guide to the US Government" to research the three branches of the federal government. 

Ben's Guide to the US Government explains how the government works and how to use the primary resources of the Government Printing Office. The site is divided into sections for grades K through 2, 3 through 5, 6 through 8, and 9 through 12. Each section contains age-appropriate information, including games and activities. An image map of the United States gives students access to Quick Facts about each state as well as information about the nation's capital. The site also provides a glossary and links to other U.S. government Web sites for kids. 

While completing their research, students used this Inspiration template (51 KB version 6) to organize their information. This version of the concept map (52 KB version 6) was completed by a student.

Digital Poetry

We often take for granted that because we as professionals are comfortable with using the simple tools in Word, our students are also familiar with the simplest of these tools.

Over the past few weeks fourth grade students at Veterans Park Elementary and Athens Elementary have used technology throughout the writing process.  They began their literary pieces by doing prewriting activities in Word.  They learned to create tables, and use Word tools such as the thesaurus and spell check. The students have also learned to cut and paste.  The thesaurus has given the students great ideas to help strengthen their writing.  Cutting and pasting has helped them with organizing the ideas for each stanza of the poem.

Once the writing is completed the students will begin to turn the poem into a digital form of communication.  Using personal photographs, pictures from newspapers, magazines and the internet, the fourth graders will use Windows Movie Maker to create a presentation of their own poetry. They will make an audio recording of their poem to insert into the digital format.  The students are excited about finishing the project and making a class CD of everyone’s poetry.  Another significant aspect of this project is that the students have learned the importance of citing anything and everything they use that is not originally theirs  (i.e., the pictures that have been gathered from various sources).

View the actual student created examples in this month's Through a Student's Eyes.

Movie Math

Recently, Mrs. Musser-Stamm's students at Crawford Middle School completed a project where they tracked movie grossing data and then imported that information into a spreadsheet. The students used wireless laptops to get real-time data of the ticket sales and create the spreadsheets with charts. The students were really engaged. They loved the laptops and the movie subject made it fun to track data, too!