First grade students in Ms. Edmond’s class at Holladay Elementary have been reading Jack and the Beanstalk. She had them write a continuation of the story and then sent them to me in small groups to create a picture using Kerpoof and type it up using Pages. I’ve mentioned Kerpoof before on this blog. It’s a great website for students to create stories using clipart and their own drawings. In the sample picture you can see the student drew Jack and used clipart for the giant and his wife. After they created their pictures, we saved them as JPG files. Then the students typed their stories using this template in Pages. I helped them add their picture to the documents, then we saved them as PDFs. The cool thing about saving documents as PDFs is that they can be published online and if your school uses iPods or iPads you can upload them to the iBook app. Take a look at some student samples: Kimber, Ra’Quan.

It’s a great idea to start word processing instruction as early as possible since students use those skills through all grades. So here’s a sample word processing lesson I taught in first grade. I gave the students a very simple template that you can download by clicking here. It basically just has the font preset for 36 (large for first graders) and has a starting sentence: “This is my picture.” First the students went to Kerpoof, drew a picture, and saved it as a JPEG image (Kerpoof makes it easy). Then they opened the word processing template and dragged their picture into it. Next they wrote sentences describing their pictures. As you can see from these examples (Edwin, Giuliana, Lily, John, Maty, Reyna, Shriya, Yusuf) some students wrote a lot of details while others wrote only a few. But they all got some good experience with word processing and writing.