Sunday, December 1, 2019

Balloons Over Van Meter.... Created With Google Drawing & A Little Imagination!


One of our favorite books to read and share during Thanksgiving time is...
...Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweetwhich is a wonderful picture book that tells the story of Tony Sarg, the puppeteer who inspired the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.  

You can read more about it here on Melissa's website. 
In November, we learned more about the Macy's Day parade by reading the book, visiting the production through virtual reality tours and our MERGE goggles, 
and even created special balloons and attached them to different types of robots in kindergarten and....
 ...second grade.  It was so much fun!
After seeing this tweet from Candace @buchananseaside, I wanted to try it out with our students.  

So, I went to my friend and 2nd grade teacher, Staci Braun, to see if she wanted to give it a try with her students last week before we went on break for the holiday.  And she did! 
First, we took pictures of her students.  
I uploaded each into RemoveBG to... 
...remove the background....
 ...and make it transparent.
After I had all of their images ready,  I open up a Google Drawing for each student and uploaded the image into the blank canvas. 
 With the tools across the top, the 2nd graders created different lines,
shapes, arrows, text and more to create their balloons. 
 
When I finished created a Google Drawing for each student, I put every one into a Google Document that we shared with the students in Seesaw.  
 They just clicked on their link and it open it up in Google Drawing.
 They loved creating their very own balloons that would....
...fly over Broadway in New York City. 
 As our students showed us their awesome....
 ...balloon creations,
 we started to think about a title and description for our project.
Even though it was super cool for them to fly their balloon creations over Broadway, 
it came to us that we should be flying them over Van Meter. 

The Balloons Over Van Meter project turned out so cute.  It was meaningful and fun for the students, which not only let them shine with their creativity, it also gave them a chance to learn a new tool, Google Draw. 
Take a moment to watch this little GIF I created in Creator Studio within Google.  They were very excited to show off their balloons in Balloons Over Van Meter. 

Thank you, Candace for the inspiration and idea.  We loved this project! 

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