Our Students Are Making Their Mark In A BIG Way This Year With Paper Coasters, Green Screens and DoInk Fun!

We love celebrating International Dot Day at Van Meter with creative projects and celebrations.  To kick off the school year, we are celebrating Dot Day for a whole month with our students in the Library, S.T.E.A.M. Room and within their classrooms. 

One of our favorite projects to do during Dot Day is to have all of our students create their own dot.  

For this project, we use paper coasters, which I ordered on Amazon, 

and lots of drawing materials like markers, crayons and colored pencils. 

These little coasters give our students such a wonderful place to create.... 

...their very own special little dot full of...

...beautiful designs...

...and colors.

Each sharing a unique story. 

This year, Brittany and I are putting a new twist on this project by using our green screens and the DoInk app, which you can find out more about here.

We set up the two green screen in the library and Brittany had all of the students do something fun as they were holding and playing with a giant dot. 

It was so fun to see all of the different poses they did! 

She also took a picture of each dot on a piece of white paper. 

In the DoInk app, she put the picture of the students on the green screen and the dot they created together.

Do you see how the background is taken out by the green screen and using the DoInk app?  

It is super easy to do. You can learn more about using the DoInk app here. 

We will be putting these all together on a giant bulletin board and in a virtual board so I then took the images that Brittany put together and uploaded them into Remove.bg to take out the white background and make the background transparent.  

Here is what the image looks like cut out and I will share what it looks like virtually soon. 

One thing that bothered us about how we did it last week, was that it didn't look like the kids were holding their dots. I ordered a round green screen to use to see if that works.  We are excited to see if it makes this process quicker too.  We will let you know what we learn and how it worked. 

And we hope you join us in celebrating Dot Day.  You can sign up and find lots of ideas and resources here on the official International Dot Day site.  You can connect with other classrooms and libraries around the world by making connections here in this Google Doc. 

We can't wait to showcase all of our students with their DOTS to celebrate making their mark on the world.