Hi Future 5th Graders! I can't believe it will be August soon! I hope you are all enjoying your summer so far:) I have been busy enjoying time with my new niece Hattie and planning for my wedding! It is hard to believe that it is only 4 weeks away! In fact my name will be changing from Ms. Mahoney to Mrs. Pritchard:) We will both have to get used to that for the new school year!

I would love to know what you are up to this summer! Please feel free to write a post about your adventures! I would love to read through them before school starts! Enjoy the rest of your summer and I look forward to meeting you soon:)

Ms. Mahoney

Here is two of my student's presentations on their Google Earth Tour. I hope you enjoy:)

One major goal is to have my students use more technology in the classroom. I think it is important to expose them to the 21st century skills that will be expected of them in the future. My students were able to make Google Earth Tours of a character that they read from our Nonfiction Interactive History Books. There were multiple perspectives that they could have chosen throughout the book! They chose which perspective they connected with the most and then created a tour of where they went as that character and what decisions had to be made along their journey. I was so happy to see how excited my students were while creating their tour! I hope you enjoy their tours as much as they had making them:)

Pirate Tour

Wild West

Underground Railroad

Westward Expansion

The Sioux

German Immigration

Pirate Tour II

Blackbeard's Adventure

Western Tour

Google Earth Tour

Hi there! My students are going to be reading different nonfiction novels that each tell about an important part in history. They will create a Google Earth Tour to describe the different settings in each novel and how the characters in each book are able to overcome the different challenges that face them. The fun part is that each student will be able to become that character and chose the path that their character will take throughout the book. I did my own Google Earth Tour focused on German Immigration. I hope you enjoy! The other student Google Earth Tour will be coming soon:)

German Immigration Google Earth Tour

Web Quest

Here is the link to my Web Quest. I had fun making it and hope you all enjoy it!

Fever: 1793 Web Quest

Personal Narrative (Part 2)

Here is my second attempt at a Personal Narrative. I put a link to my rubric below (In my earlier post). It is posted in Google Docs. I'm pretty sure everybody has a gmali account so you should be able to view it with no problems.

Video-Podcast

I used the software Audacity to do my podcast. This is a very easy recording software that enabled me to record my voice and message. Then I used the Movie Maker software to incorporate pictures to go along with my podcast. I was able to take the Audacity recording software and put it over my pictures in Movie Maker so I could time it more accurately. At first I had some difficulty, but was then able to save my recording as a MP3 and then insert it into my slide show (However, I had to call Help Desk to get this installed so I could save my recordings from Audacity as MP3's). It was a learning process but one that was worthwhile! I feel like I could use this software with my students, especially for working on fluency and letting the student's hear their voice and how they sound when they read! That is huge:)