*Students LOVED the exploration week. By giving them a lot of time to learn and investigate all of the animal reports on PebbleGo the students were taking in vocabulary, informational text and scientific information like I have never seen!!! And because of the great features like spoken text and short videos all of my students were engaged, including a my new to English speaking students and my Special Education students. I highly recommend giving your students an extended period of time to research and look around on PebbleGo, I promise it will be worth it to see them be so excited to learn!
*The paper that I created for students to record their information seems to be working wonderfully! I did have a few students draw just the eyes of their animals in the first box (my fault, I put an eye clip art there as a visual for what it looks like. Some kiddos are just that literal). The small box keeps them on task and the 2 writing lines are about the right amount of writing space for where we are at academically right now.
*Speaking of the writing piece, this has gone a lot more smoothly than I thought! What's cool is that when you press the speaker icon in the PebbleGo articles not only does it read to you but it highlights each individual word. If you press the speaker button again it pauses and leaves the highlight box on that word. This proved to be worth it's weight in gold as my lower skilled students were able to just copy the word in the highlight box, allowing us to be able to read what the label to their picture was. I'd have everyone listen to the entire paragraph for each tab, think of the key words, then listen again to the article and when they heard their key word press the speaker button to pause the highlight box on that word. You have to be paying attention and press quickly, but it worked well! It was a good teaching moment to make sure the word we were writing had matching sounds as our key words. My higher skilled students would paraphrase what they read and sound spell it out or copy the tougher vocab words by using the highlighted box in the article. I didn't have one student say "I can't do it!" or "Teacher how do you spell..." LOVING the independent factor here!
*For the cover page illustration we discussed as a whole group how to draw the animals as best as we can (reviewing shapes-bonus!) and what our rubric for drawing it would be. We discussed using proper colors (no polar bears are not pink) and how to make it fit in the space. Since I knew we would be using the pictures in Chatterkid I wanted the, to be large enough to make the mouth needed for the Chatterkid app. I then divided the students into their animal groups and put a Chromebook with each group with a large picture of their animal. I had thought to let them look for their own image but we were short on time and I chose animals that looked easier to draw.
Well that's it for now! Don't forget to check out my other posts on PebbleGo! Let me know if you are using it and if so, how!
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