Class Dojo Winter Break Challenge

Here's a fun, optional way to keep the kids engaged over breaks. Post a quick challenge question every few days on Class Dojo through Class Story. I am using a google form to make it very quick and easy to see who is participating and award "Challenge Accepted" points.

I used Google Drawing to make an image with the question to use as the photo. Images will get more attention and quickly show the question. You can download the drawing as a png or jpg file to use as the photo and as the header for your form if you'd like. I used the frame and images from Creative Clips on TPT but anything will do.

I'm keeping each challenge to one question to keep it simple. Here is a copy of my Google Form if you'd like to make something similar. https://goo.gl/HLdlUd

It might also be fun to keep the challenges going when break is over. Think about having the students submit challenge questions for the class. They would love to see their challenge be sent out over Class Story!

Creating Digital Word Sorts

Some tips to creating a word sort using google slides:

Decide on your category headers and lay them out at the top. Set up your background. Once you’ve got it the way you want it, download as an image - I usually use png, but jpg would work too. Then go to ‘change background’ and add that image as a background.

This makes it so a student can’t accidentally change the headers or categories.

Make the word cards by using shapes and typing inside the shape. If you want them to be in a neat stack, select them all (you can select everything by holding the left mouse button and dragging over everything you want selected). Go to Arrange, then arrange vertically, then arrange horizontally. They will be in one neat stack that you can place wherever you want.

You could also make the word cards so those can’t be altered by creating them like you did the background and downloading them as an image, and then uploading them to the slides file. It depends on how important this is to your class and how much time you want to put into it.

Here is an example of a completed word sort that we used last week. The link will prompt you to make a copy.

Word Sort - Adding -ed and -ing

Image of word sort linked above

Google Slides to Stop Animation

• You can use Google Slides to create stop animation. 
• Open a slides file
• Create a beginning slide
• Duplicate and change it slightly to tell your story
• Do this many more times

• When finished, choose File, Publish to the Web
• you will set the file to auto-advance every second
• set to start as soon as the player loads
• choose restart the slideshow if you want it to loop

• Press Publish and copy the code
• Open a new tab and enter the url in the address bar
• You will see in the url a portion that says delayms=1000, this means that that each slide shows for 1000 milliseconds or 1 second. You want it to move faster for the animation. So before you hit enter, change this number to something smaller. Half a second would be 500 milliseconds. We used 200 for most of our stop animation.
• Press enter and check
• Adjust as needed
• You may need to make more copies of images where you want that image to be on the screen a little longer.

Once you get it the way you want it, copy the link again from the Publish to web, add it to a new tab, change the timing to what you feel is right, then copy that address to use where you want it to go.

Once you get it the way you want it, you can take the url and create a QR code. This makes a fun way for families to access the stop animation projects that students create. 

We used the QR codes in ornaments as a holiday gift for families. 

  

  

Interesting to Note: When we were adjusting the timing of the slides, the 3rd grade students seemed to easily make sense of how 1000ms is 1 second, so if they want the slides to go faster then 500ms would be half a second. When I asked how fast 200ms would be they worked it out quickly that it would be 5 slides a second.
Happy Happy Teacher!
Maybe this will lay some foundation into how fractions work.