This afternoon in the AT&T Classroom the second graders explored two tools for use within the Common Core areas of reading and math. Over the past few weeks, the second graders have explored several tools for math practice including Butterfly Math, Make 10+, and Sushi Montster. This afternoon the second graders were introduced to PopMath Lite. The PopMath Lite app is the free version of the award winning PopMath app. The app is designed to provide opportunities for children to practice basic math skills in a game-like format. PopMath Lite is available for download from both the itunes App store and Google Play.
Later in the afternoon the students were introduced to Popplet, a free concept-mapping tool. A concept map is a graphical diagram that provides a visual representation of the relationship between concepts. Teachers often use concept maps as a strategy to facilitate students’ critical thinking and their ability to identify and understand similarities and differences among key concepts. Today Mrs. Marshall introduced Popplet to the students for a reading comprehension activity in relationship to their story-of-the-week. Mrs. Marshall demonstrated how to create the main bubble for the story-of-the-week that would be the focus of the Popplet and then as a class the students created “popples” (aka bubbles) and together outlined the details from the story related to the concepts of who, what, where, when and why.