During my 5 year old's Kindergarten orientation, the teacher explained how the kids could get extra "explore" time at the end of the week for good behavior.
Here's a fun activity just for that kind of situation that works great on a SMART Board called Circle The Cat. The objective is to trap the cat so it cannot escape. To trap the cat, you need to encirle it with green dots. It's really quite addictive and lots of fun as well. The only tip I can give you is to pay attention to the green dots that are already in place when the game starts and try to utilize those as much as possible.
If you use the Firefox browser, you can download the Flash Game Maximizer addon to play this game in full screen. You can also use your browser's zoom capabilities to make the game as big as possible.
The online, games-based teaching resource, Mangahigh, announced recently that their entire service is available free of charge for all schools in the US, Canada, and the UK.
Mangahigh creates exceptionally high-quality, game-based learning resources to help Primary and Secondary students reinforce their Mathematics skills in a way that is both fun and engaging. In addition to all the great resources, the service includes assessment and analytical tools that enable teachers to monitor the progress of individual students. Best of all, these activities work great on the SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard.
As a certified Mathematics instructor, I believe it's important for teachers to rely on multiple methods of instruction including appropriately developed game-based instruction. This field of education is growing and the quality of the resources is improving all the time.
Providing these resouces free of charge is a fantastic opportunity that you should take advantage of immediately. Please share this information with the other teachers in your school as well as the school principal.
The image above is taken from one of the Primary activities called Flower Power. This is a extremely engaging activity that challenges students to place the flowers in the correct order.
If you want more information about Mangehigh, you can also read my prior blog post which highlights another activity called Transtar.
It's really easy to have some fun with the SMART Board and get the kids involved in new and exciting ways. However, sometimes it's difficult for teachers to know where to start.
Here's one of my favorite interactive websites for children aged 3 to 7 to help them with their reading and writing. It's called Between the Lions and it's based on the PBS television show with the same name. It's really an incredible site that contains games, videos, stories, printables, downloadable music, and much, much more.
Here is their description:
Between the Lions is designed to help kids ages 3 to 7 learn to read. Unique among the hundreds of programs aimed at children, this puppet, animated, and live-action show is based on a detailed and rigorous literacy curriculum. It was developed in extensive and ongoing consultation with reading professionals. The result is a lively, educational blend of phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and other teaching methods for preschool, kindergarten, and first grade students. Several independent, scientifically-based reading research studies have shown that Between the Lions has a significant impact in increasing children's literacy.
I'm excited to make 2011 the best year of "Sharing Is Caring" yet and I hope you will too. Please let the other teachers in your school know about this amazing resource.
I wanted to share a fun Smart Notebook review game to thank you for what you do in the classroom and for dedicating your life to the most important and rewarding profession in the world. I'm honored to share resources and support all teachers who love SMART Boards.
The game is a U.S. Western States and Capitals review game for two teams: The Grusome Ghosts and the Giddy Ghouls. Questions and Point Values are selected at random and the game is played until all the questions have been selected or one of the teams reaches a predetermined point total.
Please use the Firefox or Chrome browser to download the file. Internet Explorer and Safari often times get confused and automatically rename the file to .zip. If that happens, you can save the file and then rename it back to .notebook.
If you want to learn how to created similar games and applications in Notebook, you can sign up to Teacher Online Training for only $7.48. The subscription is re-curring and you can cancel at anytime. We're so sure you'll love our self-paced courses that we will refund your entire payment if you're not completely satisfied with the courses. No questions asked!
The courses are online and teachers work at their own pace to create authentic lessons. Most course can be completed in only 1 to 2 hours and you can stop and start as often as you like.
Spelloween - Practice your spelling by identifying correctly and incorrectly spelled words. You may want to bypass the part that asks you to type the word correctly since this is difficult to do on the SMART Board (middle / high).
Frankenbrain - Find the brain if you dare! (primary / middle)
Carve a Pumpkin - The best online interactive pumpkin carving site. You'll love this! (primary)
Monster Band - Create your own band! This is a flash file that can also be inserted into Notebook.
Notebook Resources
Halloween Jokes - A Notebook file containing 10 different Halloween jokes. Lots of fun for the kids.
Wizard Spell Ordering Numbers - Have the Wizard conjure up five numbers and then use a counter-spell and place the numbers into the correct order. (Shared by Peggy DuBose)
Halloween Ghost Countdown - Keep track of correct answers using this fun Notebook countdown that announces a winner after five correct answers (4 stars)
Halloween Random Number - Generate a random number and student say whether it is less than, equal to, or greater than the late great Lucius Creven who died at the age of a hundred seven.
TeqSmart Halloween Word Bucket (Notebook Gallary item) - Create fun and interactive sorting activities, word lists, Foreign language activities, math fact reviews, and more with a Halloween theme.
Halloween Sound Files
All the sound files below are in mp3 format and can be imported in Smart Notebook
I believe we'll be seeing a lot more sites like Quia that allow teachers to develop their own interactive activities for the classroom. I was experimenting with some interactive Battleship games on Quia created by teachers and shared on the Quia site for everyone to use. The Battleship games work great on the SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard.
To find a Battleship game to play from the shared resources section of Quia, all I did was choose a subject area and then I chose Battleship from the Activity Type search field. You can also enter in keywords, sub-categories, etc. to help narrow things down a bit, but your search results may come back empty. After I did my search, I simply scrolled through my list until I found something relevant.
The Battleship game is simple. You play against the computer and you take turns trying to find the ships on the game board. If you hit one of the computer's ships, you'll need to answer a question by choosing the correct answer from the list provided. If you are right, you get a hit. If you are wrong, you'll need to try again on your next turn.
I can think of a number of different ways a teacher could use this review activity in the classroom. These activities are also flash-based so you can use the Flash Game Maximizer add-on in Firefox to make the activity as large as possible on the SMART Board.
You can subscribe to Quia to access additional resources and create your own interactive games, however, you don't need to subscribe to access the shared resource library. Quia has a 30 day free trial if you're interested in checking out all the resources.
Sharing Is Caring!
the most effective, affordable, and fun way to learn how to use the SMART Notebook software
It's getting close to the end of the year for many teachers and sometimes it can be a challenge keeping students occupied in a creative manner.
If you're looking for some interactive games you can use with your SMART Board to help with the last 10 minutes of a class period, you may want to scroll through the "Games" category here on Teachers Love SMART Boards. I'm sure you'll find something fun for your students.
That's just about the silliest blog title I've ever used but I'll stick with it since I've been having a lot of fun using a simple little application called Connectsums.
The game is very simple. Students are presented with a target number and they have to select the correct combination of numbers that add up to the target number.
The game has options for using coins, digits, or dice when displaying the numbers and you can play using a timer or a countdown. It's really amazing how well this simple game can improve your ability to count change using coins. Since you're working against a timer, it challenges you to find the best combination to use in order to improve your time. This game is addicting and it definitely helps students recognize summation combinations.
Another fun game that's also available for the iPhone/iTouch is Sumsstacker. This game requires you to drag and drop numbers (coins, digits, or dice) around until you have the correct sum for each column. Once again, this game is very addicting and it doesn't take long for students to start recognizing patterns.
Both of these fun little applications work great on the SMART Board interactive whiteboard.
Sharing Is Caring!
the most effective, affordable, and fun way to learn how to use the SMART Notebook software
I have gathered various Halloween resources for the SMART Board and placed them on a special Halloween Resource page.
The page includes Clip Art, Games, Creative Activities, Informational Sites, Notebook Files, and Sound Files
The Clip Art Photo Library contains free clip art that you can add to your Notebook files. You should find exactly what you're looking for here without the need to scour the Internet...I've already done the legwork!
I've also gathered some fun mp3 sound files that you can save to your computer and import into your Notebook file. Sound is a great way to get the kids excited about using the SMART Board!
I also have various Notebook files including word search riddles, a number sense game, and a ghost countdown.
I will continue to add to this page as we move closer to Halloween. If you know of any additional Halloween resources that work great on the SMART Board, please share the resource in the comment area and I'll try to add it to the page.
More education-based websites really need to follow the example of PBS KIDS and begin building libraries of activities that are developed for teachers who will be using the activity on an Interactive Whiteboard like a SMART Board.
If any companies or developers are looking for what makes a good interactive whiteboard activity, I would be more than happy to send you my rubric for how I evaluate sites that I recommend. For example, activities should have a full screen mode or at least allow the teacher to increase the size of the activity to fill the whiteboard.
The PBS KIDS Interactive Whiteboard Games collection is simply outstanding and definitely deserves the credit it gets. For reasons that should become obvious, it is also the #1 website shared by the teachers who I follow on Twitter.
When you go to the site, you can click on the subject area and it will do a fun scroll to that particular subject area. In addition, you can also sort on title, description, level, topic, and audio by clicking on the corresponding word in the header for each subject.
Please share this wonderful resource with other teachers and even parents. They'll be glad you did.
I hope someone can explain why I like playing with sand so much. Not only can I go out to my backyard and build a sand castle, I can now go to thisissand.com and play all day without getting any sand between my toes.
I wanted to see if this site worked okay on the SMART Board so I just fired up the SMART Board in my office and let my 8 year old daughter play around on the site before she went to school. She was absolutely transfixed by this activity that simply drops sand from anywhere you touch on the SMART Board. If you touch and drag your finger, the sand follows your movements and drops sand from wherever your finger is.
You can use the onscreen keyboard to change the color of the sand and you can double-click to make the sand fall continuously without touching the SMART Board.
So, is there any educational value to this activity? I'll let you play around on the site and discover for yourself.
[WARNING: One of my readers just warned me that there are inappropriate pictures in the Gallery of thisissand.com. Please do not open the Gallery in front of your students.]
It's Friday. The school year is almost finished. What can you do to keep the kids from an impromptu game of "glue the teacher to the chair?"
Why not have the kids play with Befuddlr?!
Befuddlr will take pictures from Flickr (a photo sharing service) and "befuddls" them to create a fun picture puzzle for the kids to solve. It's a perfect application for the SMART Board! It even times how long it takes them solve the puzzle.
Here's a fun collection of interactive websites related to Music that work great on your SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard. Please use the comment section to share your favorites.
I wasn't going to mention the site TrainTracker until I saw how completely engaged my 3 year old son became when he started using it.
At first, he just started putting any type of track on the screen and he wasn't overly concerned about where it went. However, when the train didn't go too far, he quicky picked up some spacial relationship skills and soon had the train chugging along the screen. His joy was immeasurable when he clicked "PLAY" and saw the train moving and making noise on the track that he built.
I'm sure TrainTracker will be a big hit in the early primary grades and for older special needs children. It's also one of those great websites to bookmark at home and have your young children learn how to use a mouse while building their own little adventure world.
Teachers could also utilize this site as a fun "memory helper" by drawing out a train track layout on the Smart Board and then see how well the students can recreate the layout using TrainTracker.
If you come up with some other educational uses for this great website, please post your ideas in the comment section!
Thank you Redbridge_ICT for finding this great resource!
I'm hooked! The Eyeballing Game is such a fun way to learn and interact with geometric theorems and shapes that students will be clamoring to get to the SMART Board to try to create a perfect parallelogram!
The application is so simple to use and it works great on a SMART Board. To use the game, students try to complete a task by touching and dragging a small blue box and placing it in the position that best answers the question. In the picture above, I attempted to bisect an angle by eyeballing where the blue line should be. After I moved the line where I thought it should go, I was given feedback on my accuracy. In this example, my guess was 14.3 units away from the actual bisector line.
The game rotates through the seven tasks three times and then provides you with an overall average of your accuracy along with where you rank with the last 10,000 people who have played the game.
I can think of some great ways to use this in the classroom. For example, create three teams of seven and then have the teams rotate through the seven tasks where one player on the team does one task. You can then have an extra task of having the teams calculate their team average. Soon, your students will be using terms like "convergence" and "bisect" in their everyday language!
Do I have a new favorite website? I think that maybe I do!
The website is called PEEP and the Big Wide World and it contains an amazing collection of educational games for the Primary grades.
The graphics, audio, and characters are spectacular and all the games I've played with work great on a Smart Board Interactive Whiteboard. The website is a extension of the TV show that is narrated by one of my favorite people, Joan Cusack.
Here's a brief description of the show:
The animated series PEEP and the Big Wide World gives wings to
the innovative idea of teaching science to preschoolers. Wry and
distinctive visual humor, charming plotlines, and lovable characters
combine with a comprehensive science program to attract and engage kids three to five years old.
This site is a good example of how interactive educational material should be exposed to students. The site does not contain any advertising and the interactive games can be zoomed to fill the screen. This is extremely important when using a SMART Board with your younger students.
I like using the sitemap for PEEP and the Big Wide World since it organizes all the resources on one page.
I won't spend time any more time telling you about the site since that would take
time away from you playing around with the games. If you have some time, why not send a comment and let everyone know what your favorite game is and why. I'll send in my comment after I finish playing around with all the games!
Looking for something to do on your SMART Board for Groundhog Day? Here's a Smart Notebook 10 file that contains four Groundhog Day activities.
The first activity (Grade 1-4) allows students to predict if Punxsutawney Phil will see his shadow. This activity uses a neat little table trick developed by yours truly that will make words magically appear after the students drag their choice into the table. When the students are finished, they count the number and then write down the percent for each choice. Teachers will need to change the student names in the table and also duplicate the page as many times as necessary. (Idea inspired by Silvia Tolisano on her blog Langwitches)
The third activity (Grade K-2) was also created by Jeni F. and it let's students guess the different parts of a groundhog.
The last activity (Grade 3-6) is a Punxsutawney Phil trivia game with ten questions. Students touch on the answer they think is correct. If they get it right, the answer will begin to flash.
"Don't drive angry. Do not drive angry!" ~Phil Conners
Fox's has created a marvelous interactive online version of their "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader" game that works great on a SMART Board.
May I also suggest another way of using this game. You can turn this fun game into a lesson on effective searching methods by taking your students to the computer lab and have them practice finding the answers using Google.
To help you with effective searching strategies, you can use this wonderful guide for searching in Google. It includes 100 tips for searching; tips 1 - 14 are important to understand.
My blog gets a lot of hits from teachers searching for Jeopardy games to play on their SMART Board. Lately, I've seen some great Jeopardy resources mentioned on my Google Reader list so I thought I would share a few of them here. All of these resources allow you to customize the questions and anwers.
Notice that each of these Jeopardy recommendations comes from other blogs or websites. I highly recommend you bookmark or subscribe to each of these amazing sites!
I've just spent the better part of an hour "playing" with an education site called Childtopia. The vast number of interactive resources makes this one of the very best sites available for the SMARTBoard on the Internet.
I played their new detective game, learned how to draw a lion, practiced placing my notes, and checked out my memory. The graphics and feedback are very appropriate for your students. You may have to wait a bit for some of the activities to load but that's to be expected with such outstanding graphics and interactivity.
I played around with about 10 activities and they all worked perfectly on the SMART Board. (Just a note to my U.S. readers, since this site was developed by a company in Spain, it uses Euros on it's money activities)
Here's a quick screenshot of their "games" page that includes literally hundreds of interactive games organized by learning area and age level. When you click on a learning area, it will highlight the games related to that area. When you click on the balloon, it will sort the games by age level.
Please share this site with everyone you know! It's quite simply one of the best resources I've ever seen!
What do you get when you decide to monitor your Twitter network of friends more closely? You find outstanding resources that work great on the SMART Board.
Here's an amazingly beautiful and creative logic game called Auditorium that uses audio visual particles to create music. The object is to direct the flow of the particles so they fill up the containers. When they start filling up the containers, music is played. What's so cool about this is that there are many ways to solve the puzzles and move on to the next level.
The best way to learn how to play is to just start playing! Be careful, it's addicting!
I've had a wonderful time creating custom word search puzzles for my readers this holiday season and I would like to thank all the wonderful teachers out there who work so hard to make a difference in the lives of their students.
I've worked in various jobs throughout my career and I can honestly say that being a teacher is by far the most challenging job I've ever had; however, it was also the most rewarding job I've ever had. While I love helping teachers learn how to use technology in the classroom, I definitely miss my eight+ years as a classroom teacher.
In addition to creating free word search puzzles, I'm also offering free enrollment keys to my new self-paced, online course being released this Friday that walks you through how to create your very own custom word search puzzles inside Notebook 10. If you're interested in taking the course, please send me an email and I'll put you on my list.
Here are some of the of word search puzzles I created this holiday season:
As a Christmas present to my readers, I'm offering to create your very own Word Search Puzzle in Notebook 10 to use in your classrooms. Currently, I've only had seven requests. Go ahead and check out some of the ones I've made and if you would like me to create one for you, just fill out this form and I'll send you back your customized puzzle in less than a day. Here are a few of the ones I've made:
I almost forgot! If you would like a free enrollment key for my new online self-paced course on how to create your own word search puzzles using Notebook 10, please send me an email. The course should be released early next week!
Remember...
I have a Christmas Holiday Resource Page that is growing daily. Today, I'm adding a wonderful site called Finding Rudolph that was shared on a school IT blog recently. I'm also adding another holiday clip art site containing some fun winter holiday clip art for you to use in your Notebook (or other) applications.
Here are some great holiday resources for the SMART Board that I found on Larry's site that I'll be adding to my already extensive Christmas Holiday Resource Page. To access the websites, simply click on the pictures!
One last resource is a Notebook 10 application that I created from a PowerPoint Christmas Flash Card application found on the mes-english website. It can be used for young readers and/or ESL/ELL students. I also put in a custom word search puzzle on the last few pages. Enjoy!
Remember that I will create your own custom word search puzzle in Notebook 10. Just enter in nine words and a fun holiday riddle into this form and I'll get the puzzle back to you in less than a day!
