Snowman iPad Project

The snowmen project is one of my favorite projects.  The snowmen pictures were created at home as a family project!  Then at school, the children used a variety of apps to create a book on the iPads about on the wonderful snowmen they created with their families at home!

This year we have turned our iPad snowman project of each book into a movie which we have uploaded to our Youtube channel.  
The children used a variety of apps to create their project based on the wonderful snowmen they created with their families at home!  We used a combination of Doodle Buddy, using the camera on the iPad, and Explain Everything to create our projects!  

I made a special page on my classroom website to showcase them!

They worked very hard on them!

You can hear how proud they are in their voices!

Snowman Fun

Aren't these guys cute?  We made these snowmen ornaments as a Buddy project!  

Last year I was wandering around our local craft store trying like mad to come up with an idea I realized that if I combined two different ideas together I had a quick and easy solution to my buddy project. One of the ornament ideas I saw on Pinterest had tinsel in the ball and another used ornamental snow in the ball to make a snowman face.  I pinned both ideas on my Pinterest site.  Brainwave!  Use white tinsel in the ball instead of the snow and draw the face on with sharpies!  Bought some tinsel that had snowflakes mixed in to the tinsel and experimented at home!  A three inch piece of tinsel pushed into the ornament with a pencil and a sharpie face drawn on and we are done.  Add the name and the date on the back and we have a keepsake for both the big buddy and the little buddy!  It was a huge hit last year so of course it was on the list to do this year. 

I love how they all have such personality!  

We are also making some snowmen for Christmas presents for the parents.  Each year my husband cuts up enough blocks to make these cute snowmen with my class!

I posted about how to make them last year here.  We are just finished painting our blocks and we should be putting them together later this week or early next week!  The children had a good time sanding their blocks and are eager to put them together!  

We have been having fun using Doodle Buddy on the iPads to create Christmas trees.  We are saving our pictures to the camera roll and when everyone has made a picture we are going to import them into a story making app.  

They just love drawing on the iPad and are eagerly waiting for their turn!  I love Christmas! 

We also made a Christmas tree count up book today.

The children did a great job! We added a new cover this year.  Very simple but a huge hit!  I bought some glittery stars at our local craft store and we put them on the top!  

You can find this activity in my Christmas Fun package at Teachers Pay Teachers! 

Hope you are enjoying the season!  

Alphabet iPad Fun!

I really love to have the students use a variety of apps to create their own special projects.  They really seem to like working with the combination of Doodle Buddy and Strip Designer!  The Math workbooks were a big hit and I managed to sent them home to all the parents via email.

Then we decided we could also use the same process to create an Alphabet book.  The children used pictures on the camera roll of themselves as well as pictures we took in the classroom.  If we couldn't find a picture of something then we drew it! These are just a few of the pages.

I am working on a Photostory of all the pages to create our very own Alphabet book.  As the file will be too bit to email I will upload it to an iCloud server and the parents will be able to download it from there!

The children also used Doodle Buddy and Strip Designer to create their own comics.

The children have become masters at navigating around to create their masterpieces.  They jump from app to app, importing files from the camera roll, recording their voices, etc with ease.  Things that I would have really hesitated about introducing don't even faze them!  They find things that they can do and teach me and their classmates as we go!  Today we were playing with the Strip Designer app and they were showing me how to do things!  "Oh, you just do this, Mrs. Anton!"

The children created these comics with Doodle Buddy, made screen shots of their work, and then imported them from the camera roll into the comic format.   They choose a balloon style and added the text to the balloon.  Then they can add the Word stamps to accentuate their work.  Needless to say a very popular app!  At some point I would like to create multiple page comics. 

The first day with this app we used just the pictures that were on the camera roll to tell a story!  That worked great too!

The students have gone on to create some of their own pages in free time!  Take a look!

Making Math Books iPad Style!

One of the projects that we worked on this year during our iPad project was creating math books using a combination of several different apps.  The children were fearless during this project and happily worked on it for a long, long time!  We used a combination of Doodle Buddy, some simple photography using the iPad, and Strip Designer to create their books.  When they were finished we could share them in a variety of ways.    I chose to send them as PDF files to the parents, and we also saved them to iBooks and sent them on to the parents. 

I found the beginning of the idea on a neat website called Journey with an iPad by Kate Lechleiter.  She had a post about using Doodle Buddy and ten frames to represent numbers.  She took a picture of the ten frame and used it as a background on Doodle Buddy.  Then the children used the stamps to represent numbers.

I thought that I would like to see the children take this idea and create addition stories with it.  I took a picture of a ten frame on each iPad so that it was in the camera roll.  The children then used that picture as their background and used the stamp feature in Doodle Buddy to create their own addition stories.  Then they recorded the addition stories underneath them.

Then we took our stories and imported them into Strip Designer to create our math books.  They turned out great!  The children had such a good time creating them that they wanted to make even bigger stories.  So I took pictures of two ten frames together so that the students who wanted a bigger challenge could create even bigger stories.  

The children made up to four or five pages of addition stories in Strip Designer.  I discovered that I could save the work as a PDF file and save it in iBooks.  Then I was able to email it to myself and then forward on a copy of the book to their homes!  I also printed off a hard copy of the book.  It is in black and white. 

I like the digital version better!

iPad Fun!

Over the last three months, my class has had the good fortune to work on a variety of projects using iPads.  We had a great time creating with them.  Over the next few weeks I will try to post about some of the projects we created.  We used a variety of apps in tandem to create our masterpieces!  

I wanted to have the children create a digital book about the wonderful snowmen they created at home with their families.  We started by using the iPads to take pictures of their snowmen.  

The children were then able to import them into books they created using the My Story app.  This is a fantastic app that we used multiple times for a variety of projects.  

The children used Doodle Buddy to draw a snowman and label it to include in their books.  This is quite a complicated task for Grade One students!  First, they drew the snowmen and then used the Text boxes to label the picture.  We saved these to the camera roll again and imported them into the My Story book. 

 We also created a page for our book using the same process to describe what  a snowman might eat!

I also had the children create an author page for their books.  We took a picture of them holding their project using the iPads and the children imported it into their books.  

 The My Story app is awesome.  The children could create their books by drawing pictures within the app or import their pictures from other drawing apps we used.  They could write a story to match their pictures and then narrate it in their own voices!  Very cute!

When the book was complete, you have the option to "share" the book by emailing it or exporting it to iBooks.  

The children really liked seeing their masterpieces in the iBook format.  I eventually emailed a version of their book to their families. 

I love the illustrations the children created on the iPads.  The colours are so vibrant!