Last Week of School and my Sanity

I teach music at my school so I am in the crazies of December with a Christmas program coming up. We were supposed to have it last Tuesday (Dec 10th) but with the icy weather we moved it to Monday (Dec 16th). So I have been trying to keep my sanity while doing the last bit of rehearsals, etc for the program. However, I do have classes that are not in the program so what to do with them? Well I had some of them bring their netbooks to class and I showed them my favorite Christmas fun things to do. Here is a short list of my favorites:

 Make-a-Flake - definitely one of my favorites. Do you know how many kids do NOT know how to cut out a paper snowflake? It really is sad. This is a virtual one but you can save the image, send it, share it and you can probably create fancier snowflakes than you could in real life. Very fun to see what your "cuts" will create. (and not paper scraps on the floor!) This would be a fun activity to do with students and then make the actual paper ones. I actually like to do "snow" activities in January since there are plenty of Christmas things to do in December. And in Texas we tend to get our actual snow in January or February.

Virtual Cookies? Here are two sites.
Old Fashioned Christmas from Theoworlds.com. I like the simplicity of this one. You can email it, get the link, get the code to embed but there is not an easy way to exit and go to the beginning other than to reload the page. Still fun.

Get your own! | More Flash Toys from TheoWorlds.com

From Sprint there is SprintSweets and the Gingerbread Man with Everything. Save it, share it, send it. Decorate with icing and candies. Easy to start over but you can't just undo a step. It is all the way back to the beginning if you mess up and want to fix it. I do like how he is on the little cookie sheet though! Cute!

Decorate a Christmas Tree Cute, simple drag and drop, can add snowfall. Save or print image. This does have ads though (boo!). The way this image comes out you could photo edit and add your own message on the right side of the tree.

Christmas Tree I like this one. No ads. Simple drag and drop. No save or share but you could snip it. Turn off the lights and the fireplace and tree glow. Nice for the Smart Board. Reload page to do again. 

From Castle Arcana there are other links like Build a Snowman, Musical Christmas Tree, or how about The Christmas Carol for Guinea Pigs. Okay, maybe not?

One hint to searching for fun to do on the Smart Board is to search with the word "interactive". You will find more that will work on your interactive whiteboard. There are lots of Smart Board lessons for Christmas fun also out there. You won't be at a loss for things to do during this last week before the Christmas break.

Have fun!

Quick fun Tech

The middle school students where I teach get to choose an "exploratory" or elective type class once a week. It can vary from sign language to drama. They go to this class for one quarter and then get to pick another class. I usually do a Tech Tools for School topic. I try to pick fun, easy tools the kids can pick up quickly since our class time is only 30 minutes. Sometimes we find a way to use them for school work and sometimes they are just for fun. I thought I would share some of their favorite fun links.

GeoGreeting

It's amazing how they could spend 30 minutes looking at every letter of the alphabet. The cool thing is that it tells you the location of the building (city) and then they want to either try and find it themselves or they go off and do some independent research on the place where the building is. Well look at that- self motivated learning at it's finest!

Spell with Flickr 
Another fun site, although today the letter N was not working on my computer. I tried all the browsers but nothing. When things like that happen with my students I remind them that it is a web based tool and sometimes things don't work perfectly. So we go to plan B! What I really like about this one is there are different letters to choose from. When you click on a letter it cycles through about 5 or so letters and you can pick the one you like. You are not stuck with one choice as in GeoGreeting.

CoolText

Another pretty cool text creator with some really neat fonts. You have many controls like color, size, gradient, the list is long. Some you can download the image in a variety of formats. One word of caution- this site does have ads so use it carefully.

So there you have it- Three fun tools to create your headings, use on powerpoints, anywhere you can use an image.

Snow anyone?

I just finished my recent post, but I had to add this site: Popular Front Snowdays. Here you can make your own snowflake and send it to a friend via email. You can add their banner to your site and just generally have fun with snow! Who doesn't like cutting out paper snowflakes?

One year I had my students make paper snowflakes to decorate my classroom. I was very surprised though at how many of them had never made them before. A higher percentage than I would have guessed.

***Update on the Snowflake making*** One of the teachers at my school had her students create a snowflake, print it in a greeting card format and write a Christmas greeting to one of the teachers in our school.  Teachers could also use the same idea but have students write cards to people in nursing homes or hospitals.

Or how about decorating a virtual gingerbread man? Sprint Sweets- Very cute. Both of these sites would be fun on a Smart Board.

Perhaps you would like to make your dog or cat sing Christmas songs? Then head on over to Critter Carols from Petcentric. Here is one I made with my pup, Rose.