Peek at My Week: Virtual Day and Presidential Fun!

I'm linking up with Deedee for...

Back in November, we had a snow day...  To make it up, our district was granted permission to test out a Virtual Snow Make-Up Day.  This will take place tomorrow!

We spent some time Friday uploading, downloading, and charging to make sure everything was set and ready to go... And then students nestled their iPads all snug in their backpacks with assignments to complete in lieu of school on Monday.

I know what you're thinking....  This could be disastrous.  Well, we had two practice virtual days prior to Monday's big event.  Out of my 17 students, every single one of them brought their iPad back, and only one did not complete the whole assignment.  In our district, only ONE iPad was not returned to school the following day. 

One.

That's pretty good if you ask me.

Here are my Virtual Day plans.  These were sent out to families on Friday along with the iPads.  

You may notice that we are using the Book Creator app.  A lot.  We big puffy heart that app in our kindergarten classrooms.  It's pricy ($4.99), but worth every single penny.  It has replaced paper for our reading notebooks, math journals, and many other class-made books that we do throughout the year.  For our Virtual Day, my team created slides in Keynote (you could also use PowerPoint) for each assignment.  We saved them as images, uploaded them to our Google Drive, and inserted them into a new book.  We uploaded the book into eBackpack (you could also use Showbie), pushed it out to our students, and they downloaded it to their iPads on Friday.  Easy peasy.  

Here are some example slides that my teaching partner, Goni, created:

As for the rest of our week, we will be studying all things Presidential!  Some of our reading material for this week includes:

We will be using the program MyOn to read all about Presidents.  MyOn is a virtual library with thousands upon thousands of books at all levels.  I created a bookshelf with quite a few great presidential books:

Our big project for the week will be creating President presentations in Book Creator.  Students will be partnered up to select a President of their choice and create a book about that person.  While these reports are going to be huge, they will lead right into our next PBL project, our Virtual Wax Museum!  Here are some pictures from last year, and you can read all about it here:

More to come on this project as it unfolds this school year!

Here are my visual plans for the week.

You can also check out my brand new mini pack.  Better late than never, right??? :)

Have a great week, teacher friends!