Happy Earth Day- Teaching Paperless

Happy Earth Day!  To celebrate, I pledged (via @teachpaperless) to go paper-free in our homeschooling today.  Honestly, it was wonderful! I wanted to share our day with you and hopefully inspire ideas for your homeschooling or classroom teaching.  For me, I am constantly inspired by the wonderful teaching suggestions and ideas shared through my PLN.  So, take a peek inside a day at the St. Francis Homeschool.

We begin our day with prayer followed by a morning devotional.  Today, we combined history and our religion.  We are currently studying The Hundred Year's War in world history and Joan of Arc.  Today, we looked more closely at her life and explored her path to sainthood using resources at Catholic Online as well as the BBC History Resources. Using Dabbleboard, we outlined the key facts from her life. 

Our children were able to collaborate on this project and we plan to revisit  and add to our page at a later date.

For our language arts block today we used Time4Learning, Spelling City and StoryBird.  Weekly spelling lists are added every Monday.  Today, our children were eager to take their weekly tests.  After testing online, they each emailed the pdf of their test to me using gmail. After this success, I have decided to transition to this method of record keeping each week.  Less paper and the kids loved it!  Earlier in the week, each child used activities on Spelling City to write sentences and paragraphs online using their weekly spelling lists.  Again, results were emailed to me and we made corrections through Google Docs.  Totally cool!  Finally, Luc, our second grader, felt inspired to write a story about the importance of recycling.  Using Storybird, he was able to publish his masterpiece.  Check it out!

Save the Earth- Recycle! on Storybird

For science, we wrapped up our unit on the periodic table.  For the past few weeks, our children have been looking closely at the first 18 elements.  I'm always looking for alternative ways to assess understanding. Today, Abby and Ellie showcased their favorite elements on a digital poster created using Glogster.

In addition, Abby, our 4th grader, was emailed a handout to complete reviewing atomic symbols and other important information.  Going with the paperless theme, she completed the handout and emailed her responses back to me. 

Finally, we ended our day creating wordles suggesting ways we can be better stewards of our world and the environment this Earth Day and every day.  Again, the mind of a child is amazing.  Even our three year old had great ideas.  Take a look at their creations and see their solutions to global issues affecting us all.

Today was a great day!  I enjoyed watching our children engaged in their projects and collaborating with each other.  We were techie! We were paperless! We did our part today to make this a better world!