This project collides literacy and math in a way that allows students to express themselves creatively. When you have combinations like that, a lesson is sure to be a success.
This project takes students down a powerful path in understanding a program such as Keynote (traditionally only thought of for presentations). Here are some of the skills they will learn in this fun project:
- Inserting text to create name (change font, size, color, and alignment)
- Learn to organize and space items appropriate for proportion of slide size
- Align text and shapes (spacing and sizing are important for this!)
- Search through the shapes library to find shapes that begin with the letters of their first name (phonics in action)
- Add up how many shapes are in each letter column
- Create an equation based on the number of shapes in each column
- Change the background color of a slide
- Export each slide as an image (Mac) or take a screen shot of slide in full screen (iPad)
Ways to share student creations:
- Have each student upload their image to a Padlet wall.
- Each student uses Airdrop to drop their image to one iPad and that one iPad can combine all to create an iMovie or Clips video with all of the class images.
- Each student can create a checkthis.com site where they upload their image and write about what each one of the shapes represents. When students are finished, they can publish their site and share their URL with their friends and families!
Each child’s creation will be different and students will interpret the shapes in different ways. It’s important to note that some shapes have multiple meanings and can start with various lettters. For example, in the creative piece below, Austin uses a fork for the word utencil under the letter U.