It’s giraffe week in our class. We’re learning all about them! Did you know they only need to drink every few days? We have a collection of giraffe facts that we always share with our class and thought it would be fun to spice things up a little bit. I started scrolling through Pinterest and the blogs on my reader to see if I could find a fun way to present all of our facts. One of the first things I found was this Laura Candler Post, 20 Terrific Presentation Tech Tools for Kids. I clicked on a few of the different tools, and decided to go with Popplet. It seems similar Prezi, which I’ve seen other teachers use. The first thing that appealed to me about Popplet was the way that it linked to Flickr’s collection of creative commons pictures, making it easy to grab some giraffe pictures to go with our facts. It only took me a few minutes to create a short little giraffe Popplet which combined all of our facts with fun giraffe pictures. Here’s what it ended up looking like:
You can click here to see it and interact with it. On the Popplet website you can zoom in and out to see the pictures and text up close. It’s a very simple, linear presentation. There’s a lot of room to go much deeper and more complex with Popplet. Hopefully we’ll be able to spend more time with it and explore all it has to offer. When I’m logged in to Popplet, I’m actually able to click on the setting icon to put it into “presentation mode” (under the “view” tab) for a slide show. That’s how we shared our Giraffe Popplet with the kids.
In the picture above, the kids are spreading their legs apart to drink water just like a giraffe might.
After we shared the Popplet with the class, we put the kids to work on our favorite giraffe activity. One of my very first Pinterest pins was the adorable giraffe painting below.
It’s a canvas painting that was for sale on Etsy but is no longer available. We loved it so much that we turned it into an activity for our students. They cut out the white head, pink ossicones and pink nose and then paste them on to a piece of 12×18 construction paper. We have a collection of buttons and ribbons that the children use to embellish their giraffes. They add the eye with a black marker (and sometimes another nose and a mouth 😉 )and we end up with an adorable collection of giraffes for our hallway!
The giraffe crafts are so adorable!
Those giraffes are beautiful! Great post!
Thanks Michele. I added your blog to my reader. I’m excited to look at your Prezi post more closely! I know there’s so much more we can do with Prezi, Popplet, etc.