Recently, two third grade teachers asked me for help. They have projects planned for students to work on and the topic is landforms; however, they needed me to guide the students into researching and taking notes. So, we used NetTrekker, KidsClick, and FactMonster to locate information about various landforms, using Word to save a bibliography and take notes. The students then put the notes in their own words, using speech bubbles and text boxes in Kerpoof’s “Make a Picture.” So many of the backgrounds available include landforms that third graders were studying: mountains, valleys, plateaus and mesas, river deltas, peninsulas, coasts, plains, etc.
So, the product was simple: Choose a background that represents your landform (or is a close stretch of the imagination), and add text boxes and/or characters with speech bubbles that discuss facts about the landforms. Of course, I allowed some additional “atmosphere” humor, such as dinosaurs shouting “Run for your life! The volcano is erupting!”
Here is a PDF with fairly simplified instructions:
Of course, additional directions would be needed for doing the research as well as using a word processor! I’ve only focused on getting to the finished product.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
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April 14th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Wow! Great activity!
July 24th, 2009 at 8:55 am
HI! Thanks for the comment on the blog! We have already decided as a grade level what our theme will be for the fall exhibition. I have some ideas floating around in this head of mine on how we could use Kerpoof! I’ll let you know what we come up with! Thanks for spending time to teach us this week! It’s really been great!