Kindergarten students at Laburnum Elementary have been learning that water occurs in different phases (SOL K.5a): solid, liquid, and gas. Ms. Daniels has been teaching her class that other types of matter occur in different phases as well. So today her students practiced sorting matter into solids, liquids, and gases using ABCYa!Paint. This would be a great activity for Pixie, due to the abundance of stickers, however, as I mentioned before, we are having problems with Pixie showing up when kindergarten students log in with their generic login. ABCYa!Paint has enough stickers and stamps to provide a couple of examples for each phase of matter, so it worked fine for this activity. First the students drew two lines down the paper, making three groups and wrote an S, L, and G in each one for solid, liquid, and gas. Then they used stickers and stamps to put examples in each category. For gas we used the bubbles and balloons, for liquids we used the different paint splats, and most of the other images were solids. When they were finished, we saved their pictures and uploaded them to CoMemories so everyone could see them. You can see a few examples here.

Kindergarten students at Davis Elementary have been learning how to differentiate between living and nonliving things (SOLK.6). Today Ms. Dickey’s class sorted pictures of objects into two groups (SOLK.1d): living and nonliving. First we went to ABCYa!Paint and drew a straight line down the center. ABCYa! Paint has become a more reliable tool for painting in kindergarten since Pixie sometimes doesn’t show up with the kindergarten login. Next we used the text tool to type “Living” on one side of the line and “Nonliving” on the other. Then the students used the Stickers and the Stamp tool to add different images to the correct category. Some of them also painted pictures of objects they couldn’t find. We even had a good debate about whether dinosaurs should go in the living or the nonliving group. Once they were finished, we saved the image with the Save button and uploaded the pictures to CoMemories. CoMemories is a great, easy-to-use webtool for uploading pictures from a variety of computers and users. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping the picture onto the webpage. Even kindergarteners can do it! You can see all their pictures here.

Kindergarten students at Davis Elementary have been learning about Earth patterns, cycles, and seasons (SOL K.9 & K.10), so today Ms. Feldman’s class created animations to show how trees change through the seasons. We used ABCYa! Animate to create the animations. On the first frame, students painted a line across the bottom for the ground and filled it in with the paint bucket. Then we painted a tree with some bare branches. We copied our picture four times using the copy cat button. Then the students went back to each frame to add details for the specific seasons. For spring, we added blossoms to the tree; for winter, we changed the color of the ground to light grey and painted snowflakes; for summer, we painted green leaves on the tree; and for fall, we painted different colored leaves falling to the ground. Some students added additional creative details. We downloaded our finished animations as GIF files, then I took them to a page I created on Padlet so they could post their animations. They double clicked on the “bulletin board,” typed their name in the title, and uploaded their animation. A cool feature of Padlet is that animated gifs stay animated on the board, so you can see all the changing trees here.