Virtual Author Visit

2nd Grade students participate in the Megan McDonald virtual author event. @GattisRRISD #rrisdtech @redprincess67 #judymoodybooks

Ozobots - Mini Robots

Students had an opportunity to work with ozobots during Makers Monday in the Library as well as in rotations in Grade 5 classes with Ms. Buckles and in Ms. Carlson's 2nd Grade class as well.  Ozobots are little robots that use code to turn, spin, speed up and do other tricks. Miss Hintz's favorite trick is "The Tornado".  Ask your students about them.

2nd Grade STEM Activity

Second Grade classes had a morning of doing STEM activities on Early Release day in April. They read a story about a lonely boy who wanted to make a playground for a roly poly and then found a rock in the shape of a sphere to play with his paper plate maze. Classes also used a multimedia presentation tool to give ideas and then students created their own Marble Maze.

Ipads & Google Classroom in Grade 2

Students in Mrs. Thomas’s and Ms. Carlson’s classes are part of the Next Gen Pilot program in RRISD and share a cart of ipads. Here is Mrs. Thomas’s second Grade students working in pairs on a project, taking photos of their finished work, then uploading it to Google Classroom to share with their teacher. Even if the activity isn’t digital, they make it so with the camera and how they submit their work to their digital Google Classroom.

Hour of Code Continues at Gattis

Hour of Code continues, everyone is getting in on the action at Gattis. Even our Principal, Mrs. Lucas can code! Check her out as she joins Mrs. Duckworth's second graders in the library learing to code with Kodable and Lightbot apps. Kodable you can play from your computer, ipad or android.

Link: There is a link off the Student Resources Page called: CODE to make access easy at school or home. This takes you to code.org, a site with lots of online coding games that the levels build. Great to have students use on chromebooks, laptops, or computers or other devices that are internet enabled.

Google Classroom at Gattis

Ms. Carlson is one of several of our Gattis teachers that is trying Google Classroom with her students. It's a way that students can safely get links to documents, post individual or group assignments, answer questions and more. Files are automatically sorted in student Google Drive folders.  Since RRISD is a Google Apps for Education district this application is available for our teachers to use. Ask your student if they have tried Google Classroom. Here are some of the second graders in action!

Lit & Tech in 2nd Grade

Gattis Elementary Second Grade Team supporting 4th grade grammar skills.  We use Jeff Anderson approach daily using literature and technology. Students are engaged and enjoy doing their lessons on a daily bases.

2nd Grade Forecasts Weather

As part of the 2nd Grade Science unit on Weather, students have been forecasting weather on our local broadcast each morning for a month.  They did a fabulous job! At the end of the unit our local KVUE weather team visited Gattis and talked with them about what it's like to be a meteorologist outside of Gattis!

Check out the KVUE News Video clip here. 

Mystery Hangout Strikes Again!

Ms. Zahm's class in 2nd Grade did a Mystery Hangout today and tried to figure out where the other class was located with Yes and No questions.  Both classes were able to use their maps and narrow down the location of the other class! Great use of technology as we used Google Hangouts to connect! Well done! 

Character Traits in Kidspiration

Ms. Carlson and Miss Hintz worked together to teach a lesson on Character Traits. Students read the book. "Wemberly Worried" by Keven Henkes in class. Then they came to the computer lab and used the Character Traits template in Kidspiration to create their document. Student worked on logging in, navigating to their individual folders to save, and printing.

Second Grade Builds Timelines

Students in Ms. Carlson's 2nd Grade class, did a Timeline Project. They researched specific famous people in History in PebbleGo, wrote notes in their journals, and saved images from the internet into their folders on the server.  After they collected all the information and images they needed, they went to the ReadWriteThink Timeline Page and created timelines on their person.  Look at some examples here:

Happy Digital Learning Day!

Happy Digital Learning Day!  Many classes here at Gattis took on the challenge of doing a lesson or activity digitally.  Here are just some examples of what was happening around the school!  Ms. Carlson’s 2^nd Grade class did digital Poetry at ReadWriteThink Shape Poem Generator, here are a few images of poems from her class. 

Many 4^th Grade classes worked on Think Through Math in their classrooms on netbooks.  Mrs. Dawson’s 3^rd Grade class used Animal Research to build PowerPoint presentations.  Mrs. Tilger’s 3^rd Grade class used this interactive clock on their Promethean Board in their classroom (see the image below).  

100th Day Age 100 Years

To celebrate the 100th day of school, Mr. Marcano's 2nd Grade class aged 100 years using an application called AgingBooth. Check out their photos on his website at http://goo.gl/vk1pab

Bilingual Commercial

Gattis is a Dual Language Campus! Our 2nd Grade Dual Language Class created a Commercial with Miss Hintz for our Canned Food Drive for our Morning Broadcast and Gattis website. Mr. Marcano likes to use Technology with his class and as a way to communicate with his parents. Check out some of his resources, photos and videos on his Teacher Website at http://teacherweb.com/TX/GattisElementary/marcano/gallery1.aspx


Watch our Canned Food Drive Commercial here:

Reading on a Computer

Students in various grade levels love to read and love the computer, why not read on the computer? There are many only programs that are interactive with reading. Here you see students using http://www.starfall.com/ to read books. Starfall has an option to have some of the words read out loud for you, great for young readers.  As Gattis has the Dual Language Program at our School, we especially love to read on bookflix and Tumblebooks since it has both English and Spanish options.

Food Chain in Kidspiration

Second Grade students created a food chain in the mind-mapping program, Kidspiration.  This was a great assessment of the concept of Science concept of food chains for the students.  Students also did writing about their food chains as a curricular link to Language Arts.  Great job Grade 2 in Ms. Wolfean's Class!

Create a Story Online

Second Grade Students enjoyed creating stories online through http://www.artofstorytelling.org/kiosk/ site. This coorelated with their writing unit they are working on. It was fun to select all the different parts of the story!

Bookflix and Mapping

Mrs. Thomas’s class did a fantastic activity with maps comparing two bookflix stories. They navigated our school website, went to our Library pages and under “Online Resources” found Bookflix. They choose "Earth and Sky" and selected two stories, "Hansel and Gretel" (fiction) and "We Need Directions" After listening to both stories they used the program kidspiration to build a compare/contrast web. This project helped them illustrate their understanding of how the mapping in the two stories were alike and different. Great idea Mrs. Thomas!

Turtle Pond

Ms. Carlson’s Second Grade class worked with Ms. Hintz our ITS in the computer lab to get turtles to the pond! This was a super fun way to explore math and social studies TEKS that align with the Second Grade Curriculum in mapping and plotting a course through measurement. Students navigated to our School Website and the “for Students” page where Ms Hintz hid a turtle. If you want to go directly to the pond yourself, go to: http://illuminations.nctm.org/ActivityDetail.aspx?ID=83. Once on the site, students came up with navigating directions to send their turtle to the pond. Those that dared tried to do it without the grid and added obstacles. Many want to challenge their parents to see if they can do it. Most think their parents will their need help! So parents, can you get the turtle in the pond?

Thank you to Sommer Elementary ITS, Jen Freeman, for sharing this activity!

Carlson's Class Blabberizes

Ms. Carlson’s Second Graders got digital with their biographies. Each student researched a famous individual and recorded their information first on paper, then with digital microphones. The class created a class blabberize account at http://blabberize.com/ . Then each student on their own inserted a photo of their famous person, used the mouse to specify the points of the mouth, recorded their information and saved their projects. Click to view a few of the projects.

http://blabberize.com/view/id/411198
http://blabberize.com/view/id/412793
http://blabberize.com/view/id/41217