St. John Fisher School Technology Center

Preschool: Students will continue with the Sesame Street programs, as well as some from PBSkids.com.  As St. Patrick’s Day gets closer, students will designing their “shamrocks” using the KidPix program.  Look for those soon!

Kindergarten:  It’s another busy month to celebrate many festive events we have on our calendars.  We’ll start the month discussing our Lenten promises and drawing a picture of what we can do for others during Lent.  We’ll work on a St. Patrick’s Day project by typing a short St. Patrick’s Day poem using the typing feature in Kid Pix and then finishing up the project by drawing a picture that relates to that poem.

Grade One:  We will start the month introducing the Jumpstart Spanish Program and have the students identify different Spanish word.  With St. Patrick’s Day upon us, we will type a St. Patrick’s Day poem using the typing feature in Kid Pix and draw a picture relating to their poem. 

Grade Two:  Students have done such a great job over the past two months working with Microsoft Word. We will continue our lesson through the month of March.  We will type up a St. Patrick’s Day poem, draw a picture in Kid Pix and bring the two together.  Adding onto our typing skills, we will learn to change the font size, use the Bold and Italics functions and much more.  We will also touch on Women’s History Month by researching some of our famous women using the Enchanted Learning Encyclopedia.

Grade Three: As we enter the final trimester of the year, students will be taking their third keyboarding test of the year (the others were in September and December).  I will mini-conference with the students about their progress in Words per Minute and Accuracy Percentage.  Students have been steadily improving all year long!

For library class, students will be typing their “Strega Nona” papers in Microsoft Word, inserting and formatting clipart designs. 

Grade Four: For Women’s History Month, students will also use the Enchanted Learning website to research women who changed history. Famous entrepreneurs, astronauts, inventors and first ladies will be some of the featured women in history.  Students will use their information for an activity with Mrs. Sullivan in Social Studies.

Grade Five:  Our students continue to use computer time to work on finalizing their Science Fair Projects.  We have introduced Microsoft Excel to show how graphing is done.  Students will graph their results of their experiments.  You will be so proud to see their final products.

Grade Six: Students are still working hard on their science fair projects.  Students are given time to complete their “works sited” and “proposal” portion of the project. In honor of Women’s History Month, sixth graders will be busy researching women who changed history, using a variety of websites, including www.scholastic.com.

 Junior High:  The 7^th and 8^th grade students are learning a little bit about “multitasking” as they are currently involved in two projects.  They are midway through the Holocaust project, and will begin their research papers soon.  Two weeks ago, they began participation in the Stock Market Game.  Students have selected their own groups of three or four students, and each group started with $100,000 cash in their portfolio.  They have established online accounts, learned what a stock is, and the types of events that can affect the price of shares.  They have learned how to use the finance section of google (http://finance.google.com) to research companies, find the ticker symbol and the current price and track the price history over time using graphs.  This is certainly a challenging and turbulent time to be investing in stocks!  Each week, students will have the opportunity to buy and sell shares, and along the way learn a little bit about how the market works.  This week, the students will learn about “Socially Responsible Investing” (SRI), or investing in companies whose goals and primary business practices work toward the benefit of society.    This is often called “green investing,” and might be quite profitable in the coming months because of Obama’s recent pledge to provide more money for conservation and renewable energy.  If you have any stock tips for your son or daughter, be sure to share them!

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