Celebrating Books We FLIPPED Over This Year With Buncee and Flipgrid! You Will Find Everything You Need Here, Friends.

 

As we get ready for the last few weeks of the school year, our students will be participating in a super fun way to celebrate what they have read this year.  

For this little project, I tied Buncee and Flipgrid together.  I put a spin on it by calling it This year, I FLIPPED for this book.  Let me tell you why.  

Here is what all of our students will do and what you need to do it with your students too. 

The first they will do is go to this Buncee and make a copy.  There is a space to add a book cover and title.  And then a large space to write why they flipped for the book.  

At the bottom of the Buncee, it gives them the direction to... When you are done with your Buncee, click here to add to our Flipgrid.  You will record your screen to share and talk about your Buncee. Have fun.

I linked the Flipgrid icon to the Flipgrid I set up for them to record the books they flipped over. 

You will find the K-2nd Grade Buncee Template here to copy and the 3rd-5th Grade Buncee Template here to copy.

My friends at Buncee created six different This year I FLIPPED over this book Buncee templates that can be found in Buncee now. 

Look how cool they are!  Our students will love these. 

Here are the Flipgrid topics I set up too.  I did one for our TK-2nd grade and...

...one for 3rd-5th grade.  

When they are recording their video in the Flipgrid, we will teach them how to record their screen to share their Buncee.  A little video window will pop up next to the screen share to show them. They can customize their selfied with frames, stickers, words and more.  

I created the banners for these two Flipgrids in Buncee.  You will find it here and can use it too. 

Here is a poster I shared in Google Classroom and Seesaw.  You will find it here.

Once our students have created their Buncee's, they can also share them on the Buncee Board we set up. 

It will be so much fun to see all of the books our students FLIPPED for this year at Van Meter.  

We Opened "The Van Meter School Stick Together Gallery" This Week! What A Hit!

 

Our students and teachers at Van Meter have been having such a fun time working together on lots of different Stick Together posters this spring.  

We love the collaboration and community that Stick Together posters bring to our library and classrooms, and even to our homes.  Not to mention how proud and excited our students are after they have finished one of the posters.  

With all of these sticker posters being completed, we knew there needed to be a special new place to display them, along with pictures of who worked on them.  

So this week, we officially opened The Van Meter School Stick Together Gallery. This is located in a long hallway outside of our library where lots of people walk through every day. 

Diana and I started by hanging up the Stick Together posters that were completed over the last month. 

For a little pop of color, we cut up blocks of construction paper to make it look like the stickers they use on the posters and stapled them up behind the Stick Together posters. 

That was just what they needed.  

We love how they look on the background of giant sticker squares. 

Next, we needed a big sign above the long bulletin board.  I created this graphic and uploaded it into...

...The Rasterbator site which takes an images and makes it into any size poster you want.  

It downloads and you print it onto multiple pieces of paper. 

Diana and I cut out the pages and taped them all together.  She then laminated the poster to make it last a long time. 

I also took pictures from the classes and...

...kids who created the Stick Together posters and turned them into Polaroid looking images with PicMonkey.  I made sure to add who they were created by, just like in a real gallery of art. 

I printed them off on card stock, cut them out...

...and hung them by the Stick Together posters.   

When they saw their posters and pictures, they were all very excited. 

We can't wait to add more to our Stick Together Gallery.  In fact, right now they are working on our special Capstone #ReadingIfForEveryone Stick Together poster in the library and...

...and a giant Stick Together poster upstairs in the 5th grade.  

I won't tell you what they are...You will have to check back into The Van Meter Stick Together Gallery to find out!  

To learn more about the Stick Together posters and virtual sticker boards, you can visit their site here.

Using Merge Cubes & Augmented Reality With Our Preschoolers As They Learn More About Plants

After using our Merge Cubes and the science simulations in Merge Explorer with our kindergarteners last week, one of our preschool teachers, Rebecca Wilson, asked me about using them with her students.  

Rebecca noticed there was a Science Simulation in Merge EDU About Plants and they have been learning about plants in their STEM focused classroom. 

In this simulation, students can learn more about the life cycle of a plant, a plant cell, plants and bees and more. 

To prepare for my visit to their classroom. I made a sheet that showed a picture of the app they would find on the iPad and a picture of the About Plants simulation they would find once they opened the Merge Explorer app.  This helped as I explained and showed them how it worked. 

And it was super helpful as they found and opened the app with a friend. 

Once they had it opened, they set off to explore the different activities. 

We loved how excited and curious they were to see the augmented reality on the Merge Cubes. 

After we explored together, Rebecca put them in their technology station for the week where they will have a chance to explore the other science simulations too. 

I can't wait to check in with them to see what they found and learned.  

You can learn more about Merge EDU and how we used it with our kindergartners here.