Kids and Smartboards

Kids LOVE using Smartboards, and I am teaching myself how to navigate the one I have in the library. Because not many of our classrooms have Smartboards, I also want to provide some exposure to teachers on how to use them for literacy. For this reason, I've designed my next few weeks of library lessons using the Smartboard and have invited the teachers to join their students for the lesson so they can how easy it is to use and how engaging it is for the students. My hope is that after these lessons, our Smartboard area in the library will be signed out by teachers in the future.

Here are some of the sites I've found that are fantastic and easy to navigate.

Game Goo has a bunch of different, silly character games. Tina's World game is great for Kindergarten classes in following directions and Kangaroo Confusion has kids matching capital and lowercase letters. Since it's just clicking a button and not dragging (harder skill for little ones), these are great. More games for older kids as well.

Houghton Mifflin's Eduplace has some great interactive activities for the older grades. I did the Proofreading activity with 3rd and 4th grade and was amazed at how much they loved an activity like proofreading that isn't usually too exciting. My theory is that it's just cool to be able to type on the computer screen and to hit the buttons in a new way. The Spelling Match game was a ton of fun for 3rd and 4th and I'm sure would be for all grades.