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Kidspiration Social Studies

Page history last edited by Amanda Patrick 12 years ago

What is Kidspiration?

Kidspiration is a wonderful program that helps teachers, in kindergarten through fifth grade, successfully integrate technology in a variety of subject areas including reading, writing, math, science and social studies. It focuses heavily on visual learning. Students move pictures or text boxes around on the screen to place them in the specific categories they belong in. Kidspiration helps students build strong thinking skills, conceptual skills and skills in reading and writing (not to mention typing!).

Kidspiration and Social Studies

Kidspiration really helps cement in theories within the cornerstones of social studies: history, economics, geography and civics. It uses a lot of really visual activities for the students to use. Students sort pictures and words into different categories for some activities. For instance, students can sort pictures and words into either a Good or a Service. This activity would be particularly useful for an economics unit. Students can also sort images of all 50 states to create their own map of the United States. A fifth grade class learning the names, capitals and locations of the 50 states would really benefit from this sort of activity. Another really great activity that Kidspiration offers is for students to create a map of their neighborhood. This activity would be great for students learning to map things out in first or second grade. For a lot of students, learning comes more easily with the use of visual aids and manipulatives. Being able to move things into categories or to create an image would really help most students learn.

Links to Example Lesson Plans

http://www.northcanton.sparcc.org/~elem/kidspiration/collection.html

http://pt3.sbu.edu/TechProjects/SpecificSoftware/Kidspiration.htm

http://www.wacona.com/kidspiration/kidspiration.html

http://teach.fcps.net/talk/apps.asp?appsName=Kidspiration

http://its.leesummit.k12.mo.us/kidspiration.htm

Technology in the Classroom

It is important for students to use technology in the classroom because our world is quickly becoming surrounded by technology. By using programs like Kidspiration, not only are students learning in the various content areas, they are also learning to use technology. Many of the steps required to do certain things in this program are also found in many different programs such as: clip art, picture editing software, power point, and many other programs that we use quite often.

Tutorial

Step 1: Open Kidspiration program on the computer. Here is the screen that pops up:

Step 2: Click on the Social Studies button

Step 3: Choose the activity you want to use. Use the scroll bar to look at all the activities

To move pictures onto sort, click and drag them

To search for more pictures, type into the search box in the upper left hand corner and then click the ‘Find’ button.

To add a text box, click on the white word bubbles or shapes that you want your text to be in. To type, just start typing, immediately after the shape is added. Or you can click inside the box to add more if you need to go back.