My grade 1-3 classes have thoroughly enjoyed being part of this team blog doing activities together for International Dot Day on the 15th September 2018.

Today grade 3 wanted to reply to the Australian ‘Connect the Dots’ challenge.  However, instead of doing this in the comments section we thought we would do a map story reply. Each student was assigned an Australian team to reply to. Last week we loved using the Quiver app so our stories combine the Australian teams words and the Quiver app inspiration.

Memories from the Quiver app

The task

• Using the provided world map (which is a royalty free map) write a quick imaginative story about the journey of your dot as it comes alive and leaves the classroom taking you with it.
• Make sure you use the words from your assigned Australian team. Underline or colour the words that they ask you to use.

The outcome:

Here are the stories:

Thank you for inspiring us Team Australia.

We are loving our Dot Day activities in preparation for International Dot Day on 15^th September. We love being part of the International Dot Day project.

We had a fun, dotty lesson that involved grade 3 in Cape Town recently! (This lesson is a variation of the Connect the Dot stories found on this page of this blog). What happened is… the Grade 3’s wrote some DOTTY RHYMES!  Let’s say it another way… amusing nonsensical rhymes!

This is how Google defines dotty…

This is what happened.  This activity actually involved grade 1,2 and 3 in one way or another!

The grade 1s listened to the Dot Day story by Peter Reynolds found on this page. They each had to think of two or three words, which I then wrote lightly in pencil on their dots and they traced over the writing in khoki pen.  We made teams from grades 1-3 using the SAME dots.   We want you to meet the teams.

Team 1

Team 2

Team 3

The grade 3s then chose one coloured dot and created a dotty rhyme from the two or three words on the dot.   You’ll see, in the example below, that the two or three words on the dots they chose are underlined in each dotty word.

Here are the dotty words:

Here are the dotty rhyme examples:

Are you keen to write some dotty rhymes as well?

Mr Beal’s  grade 1-3 classes in Cape Town have had a lot of fun with the Quiver app as part of their Dot Day activities. It was the first time they had been exposed to Augmented Reality and it brought ‘Wows!’ of delight. You can find out more about using the Quiver app for Dot Day on this page on this blog.

The grade 1s used Quiver in conjunction with Paint 3D. They created colourful dots on our Windows 10 computers and watched the dots come alive when they looked at them through Quiver on a cell phone or iPad. It was their first introduction to Augmented Reality and I loved the shouts of excitement.

Colouring in the Quiver Dot page

Watching the dot come to life

Now the dot-ball is moving around

When using the selfie mode on the app, the ball became small. I was amused at the way some of the grade 1s tried to get the ball into their mouths!

I wonder ‘Can I eat it?’

In the grade 2 and 3 lesson we coloured in the downloaded Quiver Dot Day pages during our computer lesson. We then used the Quiver app to make the dots come alive. The grade 2s and 3s hadn’t used Quiver yet either and they were very excited about their dots changing into 3D balls.  We heard comments like:  “This is amazing!” “The ball keeps growing!” Ït’s bigger than my head!” “I wonder if this is a chocolate!” “This is such fun!”  “I have got to get this into my mouth! and more…”

We are wondering what our next steps are now that we have all these lovely Quiver pictures.
We could:

• Use them as a story prompt for a quick imaginative story about a dot that came alive
• Use them for a guided ‘dot poetry-writing’ activity.
• Use them as a mapping adventure showing the journey of the dot-ball as it leaves the classroom.
• Use them to create a story by selecting from a number of headings such as:
  “The princess’s magic ball”
  “A trip to China with a magic ball’
  “Travelling in a hot balloon”
  “The day my team won the soccer match”
  ‘Flying around with my magic ball”
  …along with any other headings that the class suggests

Could you think of any further ideas?

Dot Day is just around the corner…15th September-ish! Mrs Beal’s grade 1 students in Cape Town, South Africa listened to the Dot Story which can be found on this page,  and then discussed a way to make their mark on International Dot Day. They challenge you to come up with your ideas for making your mark!

We used and adapted the template created by Di Benner ‘About Me Emoji Google Slide Activity‘  which comes from her wonderful page of Emoji links  http://bit.ly/2M6Dhmc for this activity.

We’d love to know how you’ll make your mark! You could add your ideas as comments.