Paper-Less Class Lesson

When I wrote my grant one of the outcomes I was looking for is to become a paperless classroom.  This was my first attempt at going paperless with a lesson that usually involves several sheets of paper over time: Counting Large Numbers.

I started out reading the book "April Rabbits" by David Cleveland to the class.

I had taken pictures of the last 10 pages and made sure that each iPad had one on it. When I took the picture, I made sure that none of the text was showing as I didn't want the students to see the number of rabbits that was in the illustration.  My intention was for each child at a table to have a different picture than the other table members.  After reading the story and having fun with it, I told the students that they would be counting rabbits themselves.  I showed them a picture of one of the pages I had on my teacher iPad.  

We talked about how to count when it was in this picture form in order to make sure that we had gotten all of the rabbits and not counted some more than once.  We brainstormed several ideas and then as a class decided that grouping them in circles of tens would be the best.

The kids then went and opened up the "Educreations" app and put the photo of the rabbits into it and then went to work.  When they were finished they saved their work to their photo gallery.  Below is a sample of a finished picture.  

I then projected the students work up onto the screen and we looked to see all of the different ways that the students chose to count their rabbits.  We also talked about what was easy and what was hard about this.  In most cases the students counted correctly.  We looked in the book at the page the picture came from to see what the number was.

This was a very fun first attempt at going paperless.  My takeaway from it was that it was really easy to take a quality picture of a worksheet and have the kids use it.  It's also pretty easy to save and look at later.  I like that the kids can save it and also re-look at it later to self assess.  Finally, I am finding more and more uses for "Educreations".  What a great, diverse app and it's FREE!!!!