Featured Post

Spelling City: Update

What it is: Spelling City is a fabulous site for practicing spelling, I have written about its uses in the classroom before (here and here).  Spelling City has just added a new feature that teachers are going to love, the ability to add your own sentences on Spelling City!  Now you can customize your spelling lists to fit your needs.  For example, if you are studying fish and one of your spelling words is “scales”, the default sentence that Spelling City might offer is “The scales were not giving the weights accurately.”  Now as you create a list, you can click on “add” and type a new sentence to fit your classroom needs. The feature is also extremely useful for homonyms (our fifth graders are using this feature this week!).  For the teacher created sentences, the audio read of the sentence will be done by a sophisticated voice synthesis. How to integrate Spelling City into the classroom: Now that Spelling City allows teacher generated sentences, you can customize your lists for students even more.  Have students generate sentences for the weeks spelling words and vote on which sentence should be included on Spelling City.  This is a great way to involve your students in thinking about word meanings and uses. Tips: Spelling City has a premium membership that has been approved for funding by Adopt-a-Classroom.org.  You can use the Adopt-A-Classroom service to ask for donations to cover premium membership. Leave a comment and share how you are using Spelling City  in your classroom.

Read More

Quincy and the Magic Instruments

Posted by admin | Posted in Fun & Games, Music, Primary Elementary, Technology, Understand (describe, explain), Websites | Posted on 15-05-2012

Tags: , , , , , , ,

0

What it is:  Next year we are adding a kindergarten to Anastasis (currently we are a 1st-8th grade school). In honor of this addition, I’ve been digging up some fun primary sites and resources.  Quincy and the Magic Instruments is a great primary site to teach students about music and instruments.  The site is enchanting with it’s interactive story/video platform. It invites students to take part in the story and introduces them to various “magic” instruments. As students learn, they get mouse practice (dragging dropping) for some fine motor skills; matching shapes, and identifying different types of instruments.  Students also get exposed to a variety of types of music that instruments are used to create.

How to integrate Quincy and the Magic Instruments into the classroom:  Quincy and the Magic Instruments is a great site to introduce students to some basic fine motor mouse skills.  When I taught in the computer lab, I quickly learned that mouse manipulation doesn’t come as second nature for all students. They have to build up that fine motor skill to click, drag and drop.  I can’t tell you how many times I had to show students that their mouse wasn’t actually “broken” – they just had it upside down. :)

Quincy and the Magic Instruments is a fun place for students to learn about different kinds of instruments and the sounds they make.  As the instruments appear, you can help students identify what the name of each instrument is and even introduce them to the idea of major and minor notes.  If you are using the site as a class with an interactive whiteboard, annotate over each instrument with the name of the instrument and what part it plays in a band.

To expand on this little online game, ask students to make up a story about how Quincy’s baton got lost and why the magic instruments turned into different animals and objects.  How did the instruments come to be magic?

Tips: On any screen students can replay a song or jumble the instruments for an added challenge.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Quincy and the Magic Instruments in  your classroom!

Write a comment

CAPTCHA Image
*