In celebration of all birthdays in all times of the year, I thought I would put together some fun STEAM activities! Whether it be a Maker Mat, a Choice Board, and a pixel art activity, any (or all!) can easily be integrated for some student creativity and critical thinking.
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Recently, I watched Disney/Pixar's latest movie, Soul, with my family. It was such a cute movie that made you think deeper about yourself. I loved how it talked about finding purpose and how your purpose doesn't matter much if you don't find the time to live while pursuing it. Such a great message for kiddos about how they can be something bigger than themselves through their personality, purpose, and living life as your best self.
As I was watching the movie and seeing how my own kiddos were drawn into the story, I thought it would be a great theme motivator for digital activities. Although 2020 may be coming to a close, we still aren't in the clear and distance learning is still part of our reality. I love when I can put a spin on something that students are interested in to draw them into the learning. I put together some of my favorite types of activities below using Soul as the theme. Feel free to use (if you share, please give credit)! How about we start out with a Google Slide as a welcome agenda? Google Jamboard Warm Up
Why not start a day/lesson off with a little warm up? I love using Google Jamboard for activities like this where I want students to think creatively. With this prompt, students are to place themselves in the shoes of Joe and think about what he might be writing on the board to share with his students. Simply have students add text or a sticky note, and you can start collecting responses!
Pixel Art Review
To say I have been a bit obsessed with pixel art lately would be an understatement. I love pairing the pixel art concept with Google Sheets to make interactive review/question and answer type sheets. Possibly just a glorified worksheet, but it engages students and self-checks along the way. It can open up communication among students when they reach a question/problem that they are having difficulty with, as it provides instant feedback on if the answer is correct or not. These type of activities could be great for students to be paired up online and complete together.
Below are two different links - one to the blank template and one to an example of content inserted (using multiplication facts). Choice Board
For the online version, I created a digital Maker Mat using digital building blocks. Students can select any of the bricks and copy and paste them to make new bricks. This is a great way for students to practice keyboard shortcuts, manipulating objects, and being creative.
SPARK (Bingo) Game Boards
Let's be honest, we all have one of those games we play on our phone that is a bit of a guilty addiction. I will admit, I have played Disney Emoji Blitz for longer than I would like to admit. ;)
With the release of the movie, the game had a special event in which you can earn characters and keyboard items. So why not a fun, bingo (let's call it SPARK as this is Soul-themed after all) game! I created this game using flippity.net, as they have an easy bingo template that works with Google Slides. If you click on the button below for the "Online SPARK Boards," you not only have the option to print boards, but you can also have students access an online bingo board as well as a wheel to spin for the teacher (under the "Play" tab). Some ways to use this SPARK board:
These are just some ideas for how I might use the theme of the movie to get started with some STEAM/EdTechy activities for students. But really, the possibilities are endless? How would you integrate the movie/theme of the movie into your curriculum?
I guess you could say this is a new twist on an old thing. Previously, I had shared winter-themed task cards. They were ones I had used with students when we were building with LEGOs for a STEAM activity. To be honest though, sometimes I like task cards and sometimes I like Maker Mats. It depends on how I am running the activity, what is available for building, and how students are collaborating together.
As I had volunteered to provide an activity for my son's holiday party before break, I thought I would send my Winter Maker Mat and some pipe cleaners for students to create. As many of the maker mats I create are targeted towards an elementary audience with English Language Learners and other special populations, I try to incorporate an English version, a Spanish version, and one with both English and Spanish as well as pictures on all. I want to make sure the activity is accessible to all learnings. The great thing is that in my experience, students rarely recreate the picture as is when they are creating! They use their creativity to take their background knowledge and design something new and amazing! I have to admit, Christmas is my favorite holiday. I love the snow, the lights, and the overall feeling of the season. Also, let's not forget about the movies. I could binge every Christmas movie over and over. Especially some of the classics, which definitely includes Home Alone for me! And when I learned that there was a picture book to go along with the story, I knew it was a choice board in the making! I know when people think of Home Alone, the first thing that comes to mind for many is the traps at the end of the movie. As I was watching the movie this year, I realized there are so many other STEAM/Maker connections that can be made throughout the story. I love to connect STEAM activities to a story for deeper meaning, but I have to admit that this choice board is a hybrid between the movie and the book. The cardboard cutout references the house party scene in the movie, the salt distributor references Mr. Marley and his trash can and shovel in the movie, and the tool to carry bags references when Kevin goes grocery shopping and the bags break on the way home. I felt they presented some great opportunities for critical thinking and problem solving! Estimating a TimelineThis is one one of the activities on the choice board, but I wanted to highlight this one as it could also be a stand alone activity. One of the things that always stuck with me in the movie was how long it might have taken to set up the traps. Kevin must have had some serious creativity and critical thinking skills to make this all happen in a timely fashion. Using the provided template, students are supposed to work backward from when the burglars are supposed to arrive and estimate how long it would have have taken to set up each trap. This will definitely spark some conversation about how long it would take to collect the resources needed and then to set up the trap. Afterwards, students can compare and graph results as a class and determine the most reasonable time for when Kevin would have had to leave church to set up the traps in time before 9:00pm. Note: This spreadsheet is set up so that students only have to enter information in the yellow cells. The focus should be on problem solving the logistics, and not determining Google Sheet calculations. If you would like to take it one step further, students could delete the existing calculations and create their own. I am not sure about you, but I am a HUGE fan of the television show The Office. I could watch season after season on repeat and still laugh, cringe, and tear up at moments. So when I heard that there was a picture book that was about The Office, I was all about it! I am all about a good picture book, and this one was definitely at the top of my list! It takes the characters, personalities, and icons from the show and puts them into an elementary classroom setting. I mean, Michael as the Line Leader and Dwight as the Assistant to the Line Leader?! :) Obviously, I wanted to do something STEAM-related with the book. I instantly came up with the idea for creating a digital cubicle space. This would be a great way for students to share their personalities, build relationships, and gain insight that can be used for building a culturally responsive classroom. As I started building a template, I knew I couldn't stop there - there were too many engineering opportunities that the story provided. A choice board was born!
Back in the spring, right before our schools shut down for face to face learning, I was in the middle of my STEAM Minecraft unit. We were focusing on Computational Thinking and how we can use it to help us solve problems we might have - whether it is troubleshooting or the actual content. The theme idea came from the students (so it was a Culturally Responsive Teaching approach), so I used that drive the content. The students were so engaged! They had to know more, visit each station, and probably would have stayed all day if I let them.
This fall has presented us with different challenges with teaching and learning. This was a unit I designed and the kids absolutely loved. I knew I needed to find a way to make this happen in a virtual or socially distanced setting. As much as I would have loved to completely replicate this unit skill for skill, I wasn't quite able to the way I wanted. Although that part was a bit of a bummer, it also allowed me to stretch myself a bit and try new and different things. My hope is that this digital/virtual version of my Minecraft until will allow teachers to insert their content into a station if desired. This content can be whatever is relevant to whatever you are teaching now (or planning for the future)!
Below I am including preview of the resources, but also links where you can make copies of the files and make it your own! Minecraft Virtual Classroom
Most of the station square links in the presentation will open a new Google Slide presentation. A few of the station square links (Station 1, Station 2, and Station 7) will force students to make a copy of an existing Google Slide presentation (Station 2 will force a copy of a Google Sheet). This is because to complete those particular stations, students will need a copy of the full presentation to manipulate different components.
This school year has started out unlike any other, so I felt that it was essential for my 3-5 STEAM students to start with a solid foundation that will influence their choices beyond STEAM class - Digital Citizenship. Digital Citizenship is not something that most students get excited about learning, and can be equally as exciting for teachers if the context is not right. I knew that Common Sense Media had a Digital Citizenship Curriculum, with a plethora of solid content. But being honest, the presentation was not something that truly grabbed my interest. If it didn't grab my interest, I knew for a fact it would not grab my students' interest as well. I knew I had to come up with a way to make it fun, engaging, and something that they would remember.
Enter Digital Citizenship Shark Week. Well, actually for me it was Digital Citizenship Shark WEEKS. We are doing two week Specials rotations at my school, so I took advantage of the shark theme and turned it into a unit that also incorporated STEAM lessons. I knew my students didn't want to have Digital Citizenship content thrown at them everyday for a week, and it personally didn't get me excited about teaching. But mix the Digital Citizenship with STEAM activities and I am definitely excited!
I decided to alternate days with Digital Citizenship lessons with STEAM activities. We started off with a STEAM activity to kick off the unit and alternated days with Digital Citizenship after that. The two Fridays of our two-week rotation were "Fun Fridays" where we worked on keyboarding skills and reviewing the topics of the week with different activities on a choice board. It was so great to hear the conversations on those Fridays! Students thought it was all fun, but the conversations I heard around the rooms were still on target with content and applying what they had learned. It made for a Fun Friday for me! Feel free to check out any of the lessons and resources below or use the Bitmoji Classroom above!
For our last Digital Citizenship lesson, I wanted to end with one of the most important topics that all students should be aware of - cyberbullying. We read the story about Clark the Shark and talked about how certain characters in the story were up-standers or bystanders. I feel that students may not always understand that their actions are not always considered to be a "joke" and that they can truly hurt the feelings of others when they are online. We had some great discussions about bullying in person and cyberbullying online.
For our activity for this lesson, we connected the idea that Clark had in the book to make rhymes to remember things with what we know about being a good digital citizen as well as cyberbullying. We used the website Typatone to write rhymes that help us remember those things and turn them into music. This was way more impactful than I originally thought it would be! Students started writing poems and short stories about what we had learned and liked sharing it with their classmates. It was so much more than the novelty of putting in characters and hearing what they sounded like - there was so much meaning behind it!
For our last STEAM activity for the Digital Citizenship Shark Week unit, I wanted to tap into their creative side as well as do something that would benefit a local non-profit, Kids' Food Basket. So, for our last STEAM activity, we decorated sack supper bags for Kids' Food Basket with a shark and Digital Citizenship theme! As this was at the end of our unit, I wanted to give students the opportunity to not only show what they know, but have an authentic audience for their work. Whenever I have done bag decorating, the biggest obstacle I run into is that students do not want to give up their bags when they are done. They have invested their time and talents into creating something that they are so proud of that they do not want to give it away. This is where I reminded them of our lesson where we spoke about empathy and how how our actions may affect (positively or negatively) others. In this case, it is an opportunity to have a positive impact! I felt that in our two week Special rotation, we had covered a lot of information and it might be hard to ask the students to recall from memory facts and information we had covered. I created a double-sided "cheat sheet" that had shark facts we learned about on one side and Digital Citizenship facts we learned about on the other side. It was a great way for students to connect facts with their own drawings to create something amazing! I created a couple of bags to show students different ways they could decorate their bags (front and back) as well as possible ways to incorporate the shark and Digital Citizenship facts.
For our third Digital Citizenship lesson, we explored Digital Literacy and Communication. I think out of all of the shark Digital Citizenship lessons that I taught, this one was probably my favorite. We started off with the story, How to Make a Shark Smile, and then discussed appropriate ways that we can interact (responding, sharing, working, and playing) with others when online. With all of our lessons, I have stressed that Digital Citizenship is being our best self at all times - online or offline.
The students were fascinated with the concept of altering images and trying to guess if an image or video was altered. Of the two media pieces I showed them (one picture and one video), the majority of students fully believed that the video was real. It was a great way to show them the concept of altering as it fit with our shark theme. It prompted great discussion and often heated arguments (as much as the built-in quiz/check-ins that I put in the presentation!). I love how animated the students became when they were fully engaged in the topic.
For our activity for this lesson, I introduced the concept of coding. We connected the characters with our story with our Digital Citizenship concepts to code a path from a starting point to an ending point. The kids thought this was super fun, enjoyed completing the scenarios I presented them as well as creating their own!
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