Maria+Busalacchi

__Maria Busalacchi's Smartboard Activities__

I have used a Smartboard many times with my teaching partner, Laurie Robb, as she has one mounted in her room. We've been able to join our classes together to give them exposure to the Smartboard and its capabilities, which I've really enjoyed. While my activities may not have the "wow" factor in terms of the capabilities of the Smartboard, they definitely had a wow factor for my kids and myself. I'm anxious to have a board in my room so that I can use it on a daily basis and get more and more comfortable with what it can do for me and my students!

__Lesson 1: Words Their Way Word Sort - #14__ The first lesson I chose to do was a word sort for our phonics program, Words Their Way. It involved short e and long e spelling patterns in words. The children have the spelling pattern and a "header" word at the top of each column (these I locked in place so that they would not be moved accidentally by the children). Then, the words that they had to sort were movable and could be put in the correct column by the children. After we sorted the list that I had made, the children then wrote words on the board that would fit these sounds/spelling patterns and we converted them to movable text on the board and those words were then moved to the appropriate column. The children have done many, many sorts, but they really enjoyed using the Smartboard to do this one!

__Lesson 2: Investigations Unit 7- Session 1.1__ This Investigations unit involves fractions, so I thought it was the perfect place to use the Smartboard. Session 1.1 is called "Making Fair Shares" and one of the lesson objectives is dividing an area into equal parts and naming the parts with fractions. On one page, I put some rectangles on the board and asked the children to come up and divide the rectangles in half by using the line or pen tool, as we were trying to show that there are several different ways to divide shapes in half. Then, in the second part of the lesson, I drew a rectangle that was unevenly divided into thirds and asked the children do decide if the shape on the Smartboard was truly divided into "thirds." After they discovered that it was not, we discussed equal vs. unequal thirds and proceeded to label an equally divided rectangle with the 1/3 fraction on each piece.

__Lesson 3: Adverbs lesson__ Rather than using the typical overhead/worksheet format for practicing some grammar skills, I created some sentences for practicing the use of adverbs. I put 6 sentences on the board that required an adverb to describe the action occuring in the sentence. (For example: How did the lion roar?) Then I put up 8 different word choices that could answer the questions. The children dragged the correct adverb to its sentence. With 2 adverbs left over, I then showed the children the keyboard application and asked them to type a question that the remaining adverbs could answer. (For example: I wrote my name n__eatly.__ Neatly was the adverb.) It was a much more engaging way to teach what can be a less than exciting topic.

__Lesson 4: Investigations Unit 6- Review Session before End-of-Unit Assessment__ The end-of-unit assessment for Unit 6 was rather long and required students to refer back to reading temperature graphs which we had done several weeks prior. So, I decided to bring in the Pearson site to help review this skill. I brought up one of the temperature graphs that we had used in Investigation 1 of this unit and we used the drawing pen to label the changes in temperature (much like we would have done on the overhead-but much more interactive for the kids) as well as drawing an additional temperature graph on the same page to compare with the original. These were just two of the skills that were going to be assessed on the following day. So, we practiced all of the skills necessary for completing the assessment in a very real/hands on way. After scoring the assessment, I can say it was truly a success with the help of the Smartboard!