Fluttering Through The Butterfly Unit With Digital Notebooks

The spring semester life cycle units create a lot of excitement for elementary campuses in Northwest ISD.  Kindergarten anxiously awaits the arrival of ladybugs, first grade live streams chicks hatching and growing, and second grade celebrates the life cycle and release of butterflies.   Instructional technologist Kelli Sanders and Britt Horn saw these exciting units as a great time to partner with Kelly Suarez, Elementary Science Coordinator. Together these three instructional leaders worked collaboratively to design interactive digital notebooks for kindergarten, first, and second grade life cycle units.  These interactive digital notebooks created many opportunities for our youngest learners to use their digital skills to think critically and communicate the information they have learned throughout the unit.

Kristen Daugherty, 2nd grade educator from Hatfield Elementary is one of many educators from our district who was excited to provide her students with the opportunity to showcase their learning through the digital journal.  Throughout this journal students were recording their observational changes over time, predicting and recording data trends on a picture graph, and using the language of the discipline to explain and justify important vocabulary.  At the completion of this project, students shared what they have learned to a district-wide Flipgrid board as well as had the opportunity to listen to other students sharing about what they have learned during the unit. 

Mrs. Daugherty loved that her students were challenged to dig deep into rigorous thinking while staying engaged in the interactive elements of the digital journal. Mrs. Daugherty also loved the ease of having a district vetted pre-created resource she could easily integrate into her classroom with confidence.