Spring has sprung! Playgrounds however are still not fully a-buzz with children playing. With schools still limiting social and community activities, this meant no Easter Egg Hunts as students and teachers looked forward to in the days leading up to spring break. I received an email from a second grade teacher who was lamenting this, but she was determined to offer some form of it to her second graders. She often used the Egg Hunt to review math facts. She pondered doing something digitally and reached out to see if I could help put something together. “Of course!” I said. I masked up, and stopped by early one morning to pick up some math problems she wanted to make sure were reviewed. We discussed using a modified Escape Room format and then, I went to work! Armed with the math practice guidance from the teacher, and the request for a virtual egg hunt, I took my query to Pixabay to see what images might inspire this activities overall character. Enter Jasper, Felix and Mel I found a series of equally vibrant images - all free to use - as I perused Pixabay. And as I searched, the story developed. The premise: The Egg Hunt had been canceled, but the teacher had a set of math activities for them to complete! Each section told more of the story. Answering the questions had students relying on not just the math skills, but also reading. Specifically: using text features to understand content. The activity included a digital Eggs-it ticket that could be modified by the teacher ahead of time and printed if need be. It included a completion form at the end to receive the secret code the eggs-it ticket asked for. It also included four main activities: 2 math review games, a draggable word problem puzzle, and a set of math tasks that revealed a pixel art image if the problems were solved successfully! I used WordWall to create the custom math review activities. Each designed to encourage competition, individually. The goal being to get better with practice and have their own “best time” and “high score” to report. Inspired by posts on Twitter, and not wanting to use the same old puzzle creating tools, I opted for a custom drag and drop activity. Using the cropping tools in Google Slides, creating the square pieces was a cinch! Then, with a few adjustments to the image order, I was able to place the square pieces “in” the basket. Once assembled, a word problem was revealed for students to solve. This activity is linked and set to force a copy for each user when clicked. But, the pièce de résistance was a custom pixel art activity, inspired by a post on Eric Curts’ blog, Control Alt Achieve. Check it out for yourself here: http://bit.ly/BCS_EGGcited
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AuthorJeannie Timken Archives
March 2023
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