My teaching partner is incredibly organized. She’s almost always planned and prepped at least two weeks out. It’s a rare day when we have to scramble to come up with an activity at the last minute. For whatever reason (perhaps the holiday weekend threw us off) that happened this morning. We’d seen this idea on Pinterest yesterday.
When we clicked on the pin it took us to Kangarooboo. (They give the detailed instructions for this project on the blog part of the website, but also have an online toy store. I haven’t shopped at their toy store.) We loved the idea of doing this lesson based on the book Put Me In The Zoo by Robert Lopshire and knew it would be the perfect activity to fill the empty spot in our schedule. There was just one problem: We couldn’t find a copy of the book anywhere! We checked our school library and checked with all of the primary teachers in our school and no one had it!
That’s when we decided that we could solve this dilemma with our ipads. I’ll confess that I am not native to Apple products. I was “raised” on PCs and my smartphones have always been Android based. So when I started looking for a way to put the book on our ipad, my first thought was to use the Kindle app. We could have gotten the book through itunes, but Kindle was easier because I knew the system, and we were in a hurry.
We quickly downloaded the app to one of our ipads and synced it with our existing Amazon account. We then purchased a Kindle version of Put Me In A Zoo. We connected our ipad to our document camera with the ever versatile dongle, and we were ready to roll!
The children settled in on the rug for the story. We projected the book onto the big screen and the kids loved it. The pictures were far bigger than they would have been had we simply been sharing a traditional book. We were also able to double tap on the pictures to eliminate the text and make the pictures fill the screen.
After the story, we did the activity in a traditional classroom manner. We provided each student with a tray of supplies.Talented teaching partner had quickly sketched up a template first thing in the morning. We were also incredibly lucky to have 2 high school volunteers in our class today who quickly punched out all of the colored spots for us with a paper punch. I’m not sure we could have pulled it off without them! We added eyes and a pom pom nose to each tray, along with brads for the legs, and the usual paste and scissors.
We ended up with an adorable collection of animals.
While I know many of you could sketch up your own pattern in a flash, I absolutely could not. For those of you like me, talented teaching partner generously offered to let me upload her template. You’re welcome to download it. I put it on Google Drive and shared it. Click here to see my post about how to share something with Google Drive and Click here to download your own template.
So what do you use to share digital books with your students? Kindle? Ipad? Something else? Let me know in the comments. I’m always looking for ideas!
I’m linking up to Technology Tailgate again. Lots of great techie posts over there. Click the picture below to check them out.
Ok that thing with the book on the screen is just awesome. Even better than a Big Book! (and I’m showing my age there, I’m sure…) Really neat lesson!
Yeah, I love that big screen. We usually just put a traditional book under the camera and read it that way, but it was fun to hook up the ipad. Way better than big books. 😉
What connection do you need to project ipad on big screen?
Hi Jennifer,
We use a dongle (adapter) to connect the ipad to the document camera, which is then connected to the projector. I added some pictures to the post which show the dongle and it’s connection. The dongle I have just “magically” arrived with the ipads when the technology coordinator brought them by. I suspect she bought them at the Apple store. The box it came in has a $49 price tag. I hope that helps.