Giving Our Youngest Learners An Amazing Place To Share What They Know Within Pear Deck

One of my goals this fall was to start using Pear Deck with our youngest learners.  With our TK and kindergarteners all having their own iPad, I really wanted the teachers and I to give it a try. 

Last week for Veterans Day, we did just that!  

All four sections of our kindergarten classes used Pear Deck, as the teachers and I collaborated on a special lesson tying in what they had already learned and a little research with PebbleGo, while drawing, writing and sharing with their friends. 

We created a Google Slide presentation and used the Pear Deck Add-On features circled above.

You will find a link to this Veterans Day Google Slide presentation here.  Please feel free to make a copy and use it with your students too.

These allow you to ask students a question using Text, Choice, Number, Website, Draw and Draggable features.  It also lets you choose from the Template Library, which makes it very easy to create an awesome slide deck to use with Pear Deck. 

As we set up the slides, we pulled from the Template Library to have them draw and share background knowledge;

set up a slide where we added the url to PebbleGo where we would listen to the Veterans Day article;

added an interactive drawing slide where they would draw a picture of what they learned from the PebbleGo article about Veterans Day;

added an easy matching activity focusing on their vocabulary words from the week with another drawing slide; and...

...chose a slide where they would write this sentence with their finger in the box.

We definitely tied in a lot to see how this format within Pear Deck would work with our littles. 

As we first introduced the Pear Deck activity, the kindergartners did an amazing job drawing what they knew about Veteran's Day. 

 

Next, they listened to the Veterans Day article...

...in PebbleGo and drew one thing...

 they learned. 

 It was really neat seeing what they heard, learned and drew.  

Everyone was very special and unique. 

As they drew, we used the iPad with peardeck.com/dash to turn it into a remote....

to show the screen and what all of the students were drawing in their Pear Deck slides. 

This gave the teachers a chance to have the students share what they were thinking and drawing.

It's such a good way to check in with all of them too.

Next, we did the matching activity on a Pear Deck drawing slide.  We took four of their vocabulary words from the week and four images we found on Google Images to create this slide. 

They used their finger to do the matching.

As they did this, the teachers showed the students slides individually and also the....

...overlay of answers to show comparisons in similar and different answers.

The last thing we had them do was write We have parades on another drawing slide.  Since they were going to be writing with their finger and not typing the words, this worked perfectly. 

In the PebbleGo Veterans Day article, it talked about how we commemorate this day with parades, therefore that was the sentence they wrote using Parades and two of their sight words.  

Again, the teachers showed individual and...

...classroom work as they were writing.

I was really excited to see how this worked for the kindergarteners and it worked out awesome! 

As you can see, the kindergarteners loved learning and sharing about Veterans Day using Pear Deck.  It gave them a place to be independent and creative while sharing their learning, curiosity and voice. 

We can't wait to use Pear Deck again with all of our learners at Van Meter through these wonderful opportunities and more!