Creating a Book Trailer in iMovie

Students in Mrs. Donze's class created movie trailers based on a book their Book Club read during reading. Groups read Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, How to Steal a Dog, Because of Winn-Dixie, and City of Ember. They used the iPads and the app iMovie to create their movie trailers!  They did a great job with the limited time they had. Take a look!

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

How To Steal a Dog



The City of Ember



Because of Winn Dixie

Readers Theater with iMovie

Check out how Tracy Kiso, Sappington music's teacher, used iMovie to create this adorable Grandparents Day video.

Using the Stopwatch App to Work on Fluency

Check out students in Mary Palumbo's class as they work on reading fluency with this Stopwatch app.

Creating a Listening Center

Check out the Kindergarten students using their iPad as a listening center.  This is a sample splitter that allows multiple students to plug their earbuds into the device to be able to listen to reading.

Mrs. Haberberger's Class

Mrs. Klosterman's Class

Creating a Listening Center

iBooks App After downloading the iBooks app, you can go the iBooks store and download free books.  If you scroll to the bottom of the Books section, you will find an area titled "Read Aloud Kids' Books."   Then you can select a variety of books for free.

K-2 teachers-Be sure to change the settings so that you can sync across your devices.  When you add a book to one iPad, it will magically appear on the others. Go to "Settings." Click "iTunes and App Stores."  Under automatic downloads, turn Books to "On."

Storia App:  Storia is an app from Scholastic that enables you to purchase ebooks and download to 5 different devices. You can use bonus points to purchase books as well.  Here is a post that explains Storia.

Tumblebooks: Be sure to bookmark from this link.  You will then scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Books and Games: Tumblebook library.  Then click on the red circle: Story Books.  Students can listen to a variety of books.

To add this website as an icon or bookmark on the homescreen, click to read this post.  Talk about a time saver!

TabTale Stories Apps:  These interactive apps make reading fun for students.  Children can read aloud various fairy tales on the iPad.   Click on the link, scroll down, and select the app store.

They Will Want to Build Words during Guided Reading Centers

Check out these students in Mrs. Porte's 1st Grade Class. This is the beginning of their guided reading lesson. The teacher is working with this small reading group and the focus of the lesson is on making words focusing on the beginning and ending sounds. She had one iPad and the 2 students were working together to build words. As you can see in the video, one student added the beginning letter and the other added the ending letter.

After this activity on the iPad, they were asked to create a sentence on sticky notes that would reinforce the sounds they worked on with the app. They partner checked each other's sentences to look for capitals, punctuation, and spelling. Here is a sample of what the students would see.

If you are interested in testing apps out, please feel free to submit your reviews of various apps here.

Students Will Create Mental Pictures of Their Reading

For today's lesson, we were focusing on visualization.  The goal of the lesson was to have students create a mental picture of what they were reading and then to illustrate what they were visualizing as they read the text.

In their small reading group, I gave each student a different piece of the story Where the Wild Things Are.

They read the text and then used the iPad to draw what they were visualizing while reading.   They used the app Doodle Buddy to draw an illustration to match the assigned part of the text they read.

We were then able to share our illustrations and retell the story to the other members of the reading group.