October 8, 2013

Celebrating International Dot Day




International Dot Day was September 16th. It is all about being creative and making your mark on the world. The day is based on the book by Peter H. Reynolds, The Dot. It is a wonderful story about a little girl who doesn't think she can draw. She makes a dot and then builds on that one piece of art. Her teacher tells her its all about making your mark on the world and persevering. More about dot day here http://www.thedotclub.org/dotday

Last month, I had the opportunity to help 2nd graders celebrate International Dot Day.
Their teacher over at Travel with 2T created cool shirts for cool kids by her, with love.



After reading the story and writing down their ideas for how they will make their mark on the world, they used the drawing pad app on the iPads to illustrate how they would make their mark. Some kids said things like "help others", "pick up trash", "teach people art", just to name a few.

 They worked really hard on them.

After they finished their drawings, and typed their sentence, we took screen shots of each dot picture on the ipad, and then imported all of the photos into a PowerPoint presentation, (drag and drop 1 photo on each slide), then we uploaded the presentation to present.me -a cool storytelling presentation app that allows you to create a video with a presentation slide on one side of the screen, and a video of a person on the other side. The kids had a fun time recording themselves on their projects. Since you can't start and stop the recording, we had to get all the kids in a line, ready to go when the next person was done. It only took 3 takes! Check out our cool video! check out more photos from dot day here



International Dot Day is a huge deal. Classrooms around the world participate in Skype and other activities sharing how they celebrate Dot day.