Hatchet and Illustrator

After reading the novel, Hatchet, some of the 6th Grade Language Arts students used Illustrator to draw a picture of a scene that showed one or more of the book's conflicts. The lesson took three class periods to complete.

The Pearl and Illustrator

All the 8th Grade Language Arts students used Illustrator to create a scene from the novel The Pearl. The scene had to have some elements of symbolism. This lesson took four class periods to complete.

Persuasive Speeches and Garage Band

Some of the 7th Grade Language Arts students wrote a draft of a persuasive speech. Then they polished that draft and recorded it in Garage Band. Finally they exported their persuasive speech as a podcast and dropped the file in their teacher's drop box. This lesson took three class periods to complete.

Poetry and iPhoto, Word and GarageBand

The 6th Grade Language Arts students began this project by writing poems in Word. To those documents, they added photos that they edited in iPhoto. Later they recited their poems in GarageBand and exported them as podcasts. Finally, the students uploaded everything to their teacher's wiki. This project took four class periods to complete.

Book Recommendation and Glogster

The 6th Grade Language Arts students created an account with an online poster site, called Glogster. Once their account was linked to the teacher, the students created a poster that recommended a book they were reading or had recently read. This lesson took two class periods to complete.

Facebook Summer Reading and Word

The 6th Grade Language Arts students used Word to create a mock Facebook page for a character from their summer reading program. Their task was to communicate the character's personality in the typical Facebook format. The lesson took four class periods to complete.

Egyptian Obituary and Inspiration

The 6th Grade Language Arts classes used Inspiration to outline an obituary that they were going to write in class later in the week. The lesson took one class period to complete.

The Outsiders and Photoshop

The 8th Grade Language Arts class used Photoshop to create a collage that explained the personality traits of one of the characters from the novel. The students took three class periods to complete the task.

Short Stories, Fireworks and Dreamweaver

The 8th grade Language Arts students created a five page website that summarized different short stories that they have read so far this semester. The students created a navigation system with rollover buttons in Fireworks, which they later exported into Dreamweaver. The students also created a link to download a PDF version of their own original short story. The lesson took five class periods to complete.

Short Story Writing and Google Docs

Some of the 8th grade Language Arts students used Google Docs to write drafts of their short stories, which they shared with their teacher. The lesson took two class periods to complete.

Dar and iMovie

The 6th grade Language Arts students used iMovie to create a video. The video was based on a storyboard that they created which summarized the main events of the story. Some of the students used Photoshop to create a title slide which showed some of the flora and fauna that existed in the time of Dar. This project took five class periods to finish.

Essay Writing and Criterion

The 6th and 7th grade Language Arts students logged on to their user accounts at Criterion, an online writing program and responded to a prompt given to them by their teacher. The teacher can adjust the settings for the due date and the maximum number of submissions that can be made before the final evaluation. If the teacher so desires, the students can receive permission to log on to their accounts at home to continue editing their assignment.

Fairy Tales and Indesign

The 6th grade Language Arts students used Indesign to create an eight or twelve page booklet of an original fairy tale that they wrote in class. They formatted the text, added borders, pictures and printed the booklet, using the back to back option. The lesson took about three class periods.

Autobiographies and iMovie

The 7th Grade Language Arts students culminated their study of figurative language by creating an iMovie that described themselves with similes and metaphors. Some of the tech skills required were to place text over the video, and to put in their voice recordings and some music. When finished, the students had to export their movie to a compressed format and drop it into their teacher's drop box.

Short Story Review and Dreamweaver

The 8th grade Language Arts students used Fireworks and Dreamweaver to create a website that reviewed five different short stories that they read during the year. Each page had a short summary of the story and a rating. Many students used Google Docs to compose the content of the site for homework, while they worked on the site design during the day at school. This lesson took five class periods to complete.

Reverse Poems and Premiere

Some of the 7th grade Language Arts students used Soundbooth and Premiere Pro to create a short video clip that was modeled after the Lost Generation video. Students recorded the forward and backward versions of their poem in Soundbooth and later imported these recordings into Premiere Pro. This lesson took three class periods to complete.

Bibliographies and Word

Some of the 6th grade Language Arts used an online citation service Easybib to create bibliographic entries for their research. These entries were recorded in a Word document. The lesson took two class periods to complete.

Poetry and Illustrator

Some of the 6th grade Language Arts students used Illustrator to create a poster with a background, graphics and the text of a poem that they wrote. Students learned how to change the settings for gradients, characters and strokes. The lesson took two classes to complete.

The Pearl, Indesign and Photoshop

The 8th grade Language Arts students used Indesign to create a storyboard for a chapter of the novel, The Pearl. The objective was to focus on making a succinct summary of the main points of the chapter. Once the students finished drafting their summaries, they created a six page Indesign document, where they added the text and graphics to complete the storyboard. Some students were able to use Photoshop to edit the graphics they used from the teacher-created graphics library. They learned that once they finished editing the graphic file, it was automatically updated in the Indesign document. This lesson took three class periods to finish.



The screenshot below shows the scorpion after the liquify filter was applied in Photoshop.

Poetry and Photoshop

Some of the 6th grade Language Arts students made a Photoshop poster of a poem that they wrote in class. They added a background, text, graphics and various special effects to create the document. This lesson took one class period to complete.