Integrating Technology with the Classroom

I taught a fun little lesson on Monday. My youngest group of kids (six year olds for the most part), who are the newest to SLP and have next to no English, are learning body parts. It's my hardest class to teach because the kids just want to play all day and I can't explain or reason with them about learning something then playing a game with it at the end.

Anyway, I realized I had a great tool for teaching body parts, something none of the kids would have seen before and also something that they would get a kick out of using. I swapped classes for a day with a teacher who had a ceiling mounted projector and brought in my laptop so I could use the Spore Creature Creator to teach about body parts in the context of monsters.

It was great! The kids were FREAKING OUT about making their own monsters. The day before I had them drawing monsters and saying "It's an arm, it's a head, they are eyes, etc." but drawing something paled in comparison to creating a 3D, moving creature that can dance and sing and make noises in response to adding body parts. I started letting kids come up one at a time to add a body part, if they successfully answered an English question in a full sentence (simple things like "What is this? Change the _____." etc.). It was a super fun lesson, and nice to do something completely different.

I just hope they don't expect awesome computer games every day.