Wednesday DEN Report - Images

I love this camel but only on Wednesday! :)

This week I wanted to move a little deeper into Discovery Education. Last week we talked about the amazing video selection on DE. This week I am staying with the visual theme and talking about images. You can find an image of just about anything you want on DE. Using images was one of the "new" ways of utilizing Discovery Education I learned about over the past year. Sure, I knew they were there but I never really thought I would be able to effectively use them with my Kinders. Boy was I mistaken (we won't say wrong because, well, we just won't say wrong) :)!

I have really started trying to incorporate using images at least once a week. At the beginning of the year, I would just use the image to introduce our Science/Social Studies units. This was kind of neat because the kids would try and guess the unit using the picture. Then I started playing around with the zoom and making it harder for the kids to guess. We would challenge ourselves to see how fast we could identify the picture and what percentage of zoom we needed to guess the picture. We have started an on-going graph to show at what percent we have guessed the picture accurately the most. This led to using the pictures as a writing prompt or a discussion prompt. We now use the images for introductions, writing/discussion prompts, vocabulary, a review of unit information, and images for reports. My goal during my DEN Star training is to learn how to use board builder (a tool in DE) and how to teach my kids to use board builder and therefore use a lot of images.

My real world example from this week:
For the past month we have been learning about outer space, cool right! So we have used a lot of images of the planets, solar system, galaxy and universe. We have been blown away at how beautiful and amazing space can be. This week we are wrapping things up and have spent a lot of time writing, making objects for our murals, and making a space video for our new YouTube channel. Today I posted the picture below and had them write what they thought it was. I got a lot of really good answers that were all relevant to space. What do you think it is?

This was something we had talked about just a little bit earlier when we talked about stars. We had a great discussion about what we thought it might be and what evidence we saw or knew to support our theories. I had a few kids guess it was a star which was the closest anyone came. It is a nebula! They were shocked to see how beautiful dying stars looked.

Have you ever used images in DE? I would love to learn how you use them with your kids!

Happy Wednesday!!!!