👨‍🚀 NASA Space Selfies! 🪐 Tools of the Mind Integration

 Are you a kindergarten teacher who is using the Tools of the Mind curriculum? Two of our kindergarten teachers are currently piloting this program and our district has adopted it for all kinder classes for the 2023-24 school year! 

I've been collaborating with my kinder teachers to find meaningful and engaging ways to integrate technology into their units. Currently our classes are reading, The Magic Tree House: Midnight on the Moon. As we began talking about our objectives and ways students could use a creation app to show their learning we decided on using three apps:

1) NASA Selfies -available in the App store for iPhone and iPad and Google Play.

2) ChatterPix Kids - available in the App store for iPhone and iPad and Google Play.

3) Seesaw

The NASA Selfies app lets you generate snapshots of yourself in a virtual spacesuit, posing in front of gorgeous cosmic locations, like the Orion Nebula or the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The interface is simple enough for kindergartners to use! You just snap a photo of yourself, pick your background, and then save to your camera roll! 

We plan to have students put their NASA selfie picture into ChatterPix Kids where they will be able to record their voice and make their mouth move on their picture. Their recording will be a prompt that we will be able to use as a quick, formative assessment. Once these are done, we will have students share them with their parents by uploading them to Seesaw.

Here are a few other resources that we may incorporate into our learning as well:

Story Time from Space- this is a great website hosted by the Global Space Education Foundation. Books are sent to the International Space Station and then astronauts videotape themselves reading the books to the children of Earth!  

How about a VR Expedition to the moon? We also have the RobotLabs VR kit and are planning to do the Moon Landing expedition!

Don't have a RobotLabs kits, you may want to check out this app for another VR opportunity. The app provides information about the science behind these stunning images. There are currently 30 eye-catching images to choose from, all taken by Spitzer. More images from the agency's other science and human spaceflight missions will be added in the future. 

Have fun!!!

Thank you to all that participated in the 19th annual St. Patrick's Day Graphing Project! It was a great year of counting, sorting and graphing our favorite St. Patrick's Day cereal, Lucky Charms!

As you can see by the graph below, we found out that our hypothesis was not true. We worked to prove that there were more green clovers than any other marshmallow piece. Interesting as well as that several classes commented that they did not have any Pots of Gold marshmallow pieces this year which may be why our results show only 1,052 total pieces. The "Other" pieces were reported to be unicorns by all of the classes.

If you'd like to see the results, feel free to jump over to St. Patrick's Day Graphing Project website.

☘️ Here's hoping that all of our classes had a wee bit of fun and that you'll join us again next year! Registration for 2024 will open the end of February 2024. ☘️