Dinosaur discovery

I wanted to share with you some fantastic work and artwork the Year 3 students have been producing of late. Year 3 have been learning about dinosaurs, so in ICT classes they have been using various applications to create a dinosaur placemat. We began by using  this database and finding 10 facts about the dinosaur we chose and recorded these in a bubble thinking map. My favourite was  Saltopus because at least I could spell that name. The students were deeply engrossed and engaged, and they had no trouble spelling the names of their chosen dinosaur. This speaks volumes about learning spelling words that are personal and meaningful.
We then sketched our dinosaur which was quite easy because no one has ever seen a dinosaur so they can have a few quirky extras in our drawings. From our sketches we used KidPix and drew our dinosaurs professionally. We learnt about exporting drawings and turning these into jpgs, photos, to use in other applications. The next application we used was Word and we inserted our dinosaur image and manipulated this so that the picture was in the middle of the paper. Now we are using text boxes to record the 10 facts we chose about our dinosaur. These facts surround our dinosaur.  Maybe ComicLife with speech bubbles and lettering may have been a better choice? Wow had used a number of applications  together to create some terrific work pieces. As the children finish they print  off and Mr Tue laminates the completed placemat. The students are really excited taking this  home to share their learning with their parents. Copies of completed placemats coming next week. In the meantime revel in the drawings.