March 17th We Knew Everything Would Be All Right: a coronavirus collaboration book project

Every year on 9/11 Mrs. Beth Laible, 2nd grade teacher at West Holt Elementary in Atkinson, Nebraska, reads to her students a was inspired by a story called “September 12th We Knew Everything Would Be All Right.” It was authored and illustrated by a first grade class from an elementary school in Missouri.

Inspired, she wrote "March 17th We Knew Everything Would Be All Right" for her second grade class during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic and subsequent school closures. She read her version aloud to her students in one of her Facebook posts during their first week of remote learning. Then she asked her students to collaborate with her to help illustrate the pages. Her students created the illustrations for the story during their remote learning experiences at home and sent back with their weekly work to Mrs. Laible. 

Beth reached out to Katie Morrow from ESU 8 for help in printing copies of the book to give to her students as a keepsake from their 2nd grade year, cut short by the pandemic. 

In addition to printing on blurb.com, Katie created a digital version of their book. Using Keynote and iBooks Author, she enhanced the pages with digital animations to bring the story to life. Mrs. Laible recorded the audio narration in Voice Memos on her iPhone and sent to Katie to add to the pages. The digital version of the book is now published on Apple Books. 

Now, anyone with an iPhone, iPad or Mac and an Apple ID can download for free and read this beautiful story for themselves!

http://books.apple.com/us/book/id1507696114

*Note: The book is best viewed in Apple Books on iPad in portrait orientation. Tap the first page thumbnail and then swipe to each subsequent page for the media to auto-play. Enjoy this story and important message!

If not able to view on an Apple device, you can watch a screen recording of the book on my iPhone here:

Pioneer ABCs: Book creation by 1st graders

To bring to life first grade Social Studies learning, this class created an alphabet book based on the "Little House on the Prairie" series and Westward expansion topics. 

First, Mrs. Willis and her students brainstormed topic options for each of the letters of the alphabet, then assigned to her class. 

Next students researched and wrote their "stories," drawing an accompanying picture on paper.

I shared an ABC book template page via Apple Classroom and worked with the students to publish their work in Pages. Many examples of combining pencil and paper artwork with digital artwork were experimented with. 

Students rotated through some "finishing stations" where they recorded audio with Mrs. Willis or were photographed in a pioneer costume.

 

Finally the pages were submitted to me via Apple Classroom so that I could assemble them in a class alphabet book. 

Now published on the Apple Books Store, you can enjoy it here:

‎Pioneer ABCs on Apple Books 

For members of our audience without access to Apple Books, we shared the following additional versions:

Pioneer ABCs 

Third Grade Authors publish book about their community's history

The ABCs of Our Community, O'Neill on Apple Books Store

O'Neill Elementary's 3rd Grade Reading class, under the direction of Mrs. Julie Pistulka along with help from Katie Morrow, ESU 8, recently published their latest version of an annual community history research project. This year, the creative student authors compiled and shared their information in the form of an alphabet book.

Using a Pages template, each "letter" consists of 3 pages:
1) a stanza of poetry and photo gallery on the topic
2) written report from student research
3) student-created artwork

Students added audio narration for all the text with the newest feature of Pages books - Audio Recordings.

Learn more about the community of O'Neill, Nebraska as well as student creation of digital books with Pages on iPad by downloading the book from the Apple Books Store.

St. Patrick's Day Writing from First Grade iPad Authors

Are you as excited for St. Patrick’s Day as the creative First Grade Authors in Mrs. Willis’s class are?

Students personalized the leprechaun character in their stories with Toontastic 3D

Follow one leprechaun’s adventures in O’Neill as he searches for the pot of gold on St. Patrick’s Day.  

Skills addressed:

• Creative writing
• Oral reading fluency
• Story elements  (setting, characters, beginning, middle, and end)
• Local community history and traditions (O’Neill St. Patrick’s Day Celebration)
• iPad skills 

iPad apps utilized:

• Toontastic 3D (free)
• Book Creator (Lite version is free)

Our process included brainstorming ideas and writing the stories on paper with Mrs. Willis. When Mrs. Morrow worked with us on the iPads we created the setting and characters for our stories and recorded the animations with the Toontastic 3D app. Then each student created their own Book Creator project and designed their pages by adding the typed text of their story, their Toontastic animation, additional illustrations, and of course, their signature. Each student’s individual Book Creator pages were Airdropped to Mrs. Morrow’s iPad to be combined into one class book. Students brainstormed the facts for the ‘Did You Know?’ pages in between each of the leprechaun’s adventures. Finally, we filmed the conclusion for the book all together and added it to the last page of our Book Creator project. 

So, how can you experience this creative story? 

Luckily, you have three options. 

1. If you have an iPad or a Mac, download the free iBooks app. 

Use your Apple ID to download a free copy of the book and then read in iBooks. 

*This is the most fully functional version of the product. You can swipe to turn the pages and click on the videos to play within the story. 

View in iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1216353000 

2.  If you do not have an iPad, but have another type of digital device, you can “read” the whole story as a video on YouTube. 

The video of the whole book is over 18 minutes long, but you can easily skip around to find your favorite parts.  

*TIP: Be sure to watch the ending of the story, no matter what! It starts around 17:44

3.  A final option would be to stop in the 1st Grade classroom and read the book there. We will have a printed version on paper (minus the student voices and videos) as well as being able to view on the school iPads. 

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from some amazingly creative iPad authors!

Creating eBooks in 2nd/3rd Grade Science: Weather Instruments

2nd and 3rd graders in Ms. Mather's Science class at Lynch Public School have been becoming weather experts. They decided to show what they have learned about scientific instruments by creating eBooks with one of my favorite apps: Book Creator. Here is a simple overview of their successful iPad learning adventure as well as easy extension ideas for additional application.

Photographing the weather while staying warm!

Building Background Knowledge

• Ms. Mather and her class learned about Weather.  Some great digital resources include "Weather" from World Book Kids and several videos from Learn 360 - both available through your ESU 8 Media Center access. 
• Ms. Mather decided that "weather instruments" would be a good focus and structure for the students' digital project.
• Each student created a paper book detailed 8 scientific instruments used to study weather. Each page included the instrument name, picture, and student-created sentence.

Book Creator Basics

• I shared an example of a student-authored Book Creator book, "A Dream Come True" (by Drew and Claire Morrow)
• Then I showed them how to get started with a new Book Creator project and we discussed opportunities for creative content to go into their pages. 

Weather Examples in iBooks

• Next we looked at a couple of published examples by students in the iBooks Store including:
• "Our Favorite Weather" - class book from a Kindergarten class
• "Wild About Weather" - class book that is more of a "textbook" example

Creation Process

• Students quickly and easily navigated to the Book Creator app on their iPads and got started. Even with the free version of the app, students can completely author and publish one entire book.  Plans to upgrade to the $4.99 paid version were quickly made and easily jus
• tified for future projects. 
• Each page followed a pattern, and every page had a plan (in the students' paper books) and so students could concentrate on the creative side of publishing, maximizing their technology time.
• For each page's images, students could choose whether to draw the weather instrument, take a photo using their iPad's camera, or find a photograph of the instrument online.  Students were encouraged to use photosforclass.com for copyright-friendly images for their books. 
• iPads allowed for differentiation.  Some students were encouraged to add in a page about each weather instrument with either a photo or video of the student using it. 
• All students were encouraged to record all of their book's sentences as audio recordings on each page.  We discussed how valuable this would be for someone who is blind, who doesn't yet know how to read, or even for guests at an upcoming technology fair.

Students excited to discover scientific instruments emojis!

Decisions for Delivery

• Format (individual or group-authored)
• Topics (jigsaw ideas, common outline, uniform topics)
• Required Components (text + audio recordings of all text, photos or drawings, video)
• Title (and covers)

Extension Options

• Along with the students' study of weather instruments, this project would work well with creating a class weather forecast (using iMovie or DoInk and a green screen).
• A global learning opportunity would be to ask each student to survey and collect data/images of the weather around the world.  After analyzing or mapping the results students could explain what they learned in their digital books.
• Obviously, any topic could easily be interchanged with "weather" and used for an equally successful project.



Transfer of analog to digital

• Don't underestimate the power of publishing to the iBooks Store.  Although these students plan to share within their school community and with the guests who come to their Technology Fair, they could also elevate their work to a global audience by leveraging the iBooks Store platform.

The weather kindly cooperated by gently snowing making for some great images for the students' books

What is the weather like in your part of the world? Using Google Earth