The Rootstown third graders welcomed a special visitor this morning to the AT&T Classroom. Lisa Young, Elementary ELA Supervisor from the Mahoning County Educational Service Center spent the morning with the students focusing on nonfiction writing. Building from today’s Halloween holiday, Mrs. Young shared a book about bats with the students as an example of nonfiction literature and pointed out key elements of nonfiction writing.
Later this morning the students were introduced to two tools they will be using for nonfiction writing projects. Mrs. Debos introduced the students to Google Slides, a free Google productivity application that can be used to create presentations, stories and note cards. Slides can include text, images, hyperlinks and video. The Google Slides application offers a wide variety of themes, templates, backgrounds, and fonts that can be used to create very unique customized projects that are automatically saved within Google Drive and can easily be shared and/or downloaded.
During their math block, Miss Vardavas introduced the students to MyStorybook.com for a mathematical writing project. MyStorybook is a free online tool for creating short story books and digital stories. The platform provides blank pages on which a student can draw, type, and insert images. Students can select an image from the gallery that can be inserted on a page or used as a background. Students can also upload their own photos or use the drawing tools to create a scene for their story. The third graders will be using MyStorybook this week to create books to explain multiplication and division operations.