Send Quick Holiday Messages With The New iOS Stickers From Buncee!

As we head into the holidays, here is a little tip that will make your holiday greetings extra special. 

Our friends at Buncee have created a new iOS app for sending beautiful holiday messages.

It is so quick and easy too!  You can do it in three quick steps.  Let me show you how!

1. First, download the Buncee Holiday Messages App from the App Store.

You will find the Buncee Holiday Messages app for iPhone here and...

...iPad here.

2. Open up the app in your text message and pick one of the holiday messages to share with family and friends. 

3. And last, but not least, have so much fun sharing these wonderful Buncee Holiday Messages! 

PebbleGo Visual Search Poster For "Holidays Around the World"

In November, I wrote a post detailing the PebbleGo Visual Search Posters we created for our youngest learners at Van Meter.  

 

This week they are researching and learning about Holidays Around the World with the four articles found in PebbleGo around this topic so we created a PebbleGo Visual Search Poster that you will find here in Buncee.  

You will find the directions of creating and using the posters here in the first post, friends. 

Learn How To Create A Snow Globe Buncee!

Our 2nd graders and 4th graders have been having so much fun celebrating the winter and holiday by creating some very special snow globe stories and ornaments to share with their friends and family.

We started with The Snow Globe Family by Jane O-Connor and S.D. Schindler as the inspiration to kick off the project. 

The teachers read...

...it to the students.  They loved hearing the story.

 Next, we shared a Buncee that I put together with an introduction and....

 ..meaning behind the project.

 We laid out the directions on how they would...

 ...pick a snow globe and use...

Removebg to...

...remove the background of a picture they will take of themselves on their Chromebooks. 

They were so excited to see how they would be inside of the snow globe! 

You will find this Buncee with all of the directions here.  Please feel free to use it or even make a copy so you can add your own pages too. 

After sharing the story and directions, they got right to work taking...

...their photo, 

removing the backgrounds with Removebg and adding it to a new Buncee...

... they started.

As they added their snow globes, stickers and stories, 

 

 

 

their Buncee Snow Globes came to life! 

They added a snow globe, picture of themselves, winter and holiday stickers and animations,  

voice, video, text and more.  

One of the most important things they added was the QR code, which is done right in Buncee.  This will then give families and friends an easy way to get to their Snow Globe Buncee by scanning the QR code.  

When they were finished, we stitched the Buncee's together to create one big collaborative Snow Globe Buncee story....

... and printed them off.

By cutting around the snow globe and laminating them, 

we were able to turn their Buncee's into a beautiful ornament and memory from 2019.

We will be sharing the Van Meter Snow Globe collaborative stories next week and we hope that you and your students will be creating some of your own! 

Adobe Spark & Skype in the Classroom Inspires Learning Around The Grand Canyon For Our 4th Graders!

This week, the 4th graders wrapped up learning about the...

...Layers in Time of the Grand Canyon with a special Skype in the Classroom with the Grand Canyon National Park Distance Learning Center. 

The Park Rangers at the Grand Canyon did an amazing job teaching,

asking questions,

and getting our students excited about sharing what they have been learning about the Grand Canyon.

They showed the students lots of neat things including photographs, fossils, the layers of the Grand Canyon and so much more.  

We will definitely put this on our list for Skype in the Classroom connections next year too.  

This was such a valuable connection for our students and teachers as they have been teaching and learning about the layers of the Grand Canyon over the last few weeks. 

In fact, they shared their knowledge of a layer they were assigned by creating an Adobe Spark web page with a partner.  This is a new digital suite of tools for us at Van Meter Community School, so we were very excited to try it on for this project. 

On the 4th Grade Grand Canyon Adobe Spark Webpages Project Padlet,

 you will find all of the amazing projects they created.

You can see them by clicking on one and scrolling down through the Adobe Spark web page.  You can do this within the Padlet or...

...by clicking on Open in New Window and it will open up with Adobe Spark.  Take a look what one looks like....

Adobe Spark lets our students create amazing presentations by pulling in striking fonts, providing beautiful images to choose from, giving interesting layouts and making their knowledge, creativity and voice easy to share with classmates, families and others around the world. 

At the end of the Adobe Spark web page, the Credits from all of the images are automatically provided and become part of their project.  

You can view the one shown above here.  Isn't it great!  

We loved seeing the work they did and everyone enjoyed hearing each group present too. 

This was a very meaningful project for our students as it tied everything together with the creation and sharing on their web page and through the connection with the Rangers at the Grand Canyon.  

You can find the Grand Canyon National Park Distance Learning Center here where you will find their information and how to connect to their program schedule and registration.