Third graders created animated water cycle movies today using Keynote. The lesson included a lot of important computer skills such as copying, pasting, resizing and grouping objects. I gave them a template to use with some water, one wisp of evaporation, and one raindrop. You can download the template by clicking here. The students had to copy, paste, resize and group the water vapor and the raindrops so that they moved together as one. Then they added the labels: evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Next they used the Inspector to add animations to each part of the water cycle. Finally they used the voice recording feature in Keynote to record themselves explaining the different steps in the water cycle. This is always a great thing to do because it gives students the opportunity to practice their oral language skills plus it shows you, as the teacher, how much they really understand. You’ll discover a lot of misconceptions by listening to the students’ recordings. Take a look at a completed student project by clicking here.

Third graders at Chamberlayne are creating Mystery Animal Keynotes. They chose an animal to research and are using the facts they find to create a type of “Guess Who?” game. I provided them with a folder of pictures to use, a Keynote template, and a robot that digitizes the picture of their animal to make it a mystery. Each slide in the slideshow gives a fact until you reach the last slide and the digitized picture fades into the real picture revealing the answer. If you’d like to see a sample, click here. All of the files you need for this project are included in the packet which you can download here. It’s 48MB because of all the pictures.