I started my writing unit for the first graders last week. The unit focuses on making an informational booklet about one’s pet, or a known pet, or a pet one wishes to have. The children brought in their pet pictures or drawings of their pets and shared their pet information within two groups for lesson one. For lesson two, I decided to take the challenge to use the computer lab for the project. The children created their own cover pages with picture outlines and typed texts of the titles and their names as the authors by using a paint program called Tux Paint. They colored the picture outlines later and the finished cover pages were glued onto their choice color background papers. When I looked at their beautifully made cover pages, I felt so proud of all the children and I shared their works with their parents during the parent-teacher conference last week.

I have to admit that it was a very challenging lesson because of the limited number of the lab computers that could be used for printing and the one-on-one scaffolding for every child. I had to test each lab computer and set it up for printing. I originally thought that the children could just use the Tux Paint to draw and print their pictures. I had to change it to be just the outline drawings of their pets since the lab doesn’t have color printing. I actually like the adapted way better because it gives the students the opportunity to color their pictures with crayons and they also learned how to make their own picture coloring sheets. Since I also had to help every student to arrange their typed titles and names (Tux Paint doesn’t allow easy text typing), it would be almost impossible for me to finish this lesson within the time frame without extra adults’ assistance. Fortunately, I got a great deal of help from one technology knowledgeable volunteer W from the community and my mentor teacher. The three of us worked together to get many children to finish their cover pages. For instance, the children who didn’t go to the lab wrote their content pages with my MT and sang a pet dog song with a dog booklet made earlier). I guided the rest of them completing theirs at other times by using the classroom computer and the lab.

One great thing about this lesson was that all the children enjoyed the experience and they were so happy to see their cover pages printed out. Even though a couple of them had to redo the cover pages due to the printing problems, they still had fun doing it. Their enthusiasm also extended to the next lesson of writing about what their pets looked like which all turned out wonderfully.

From this cover page making lesson, I learned that all children love to be engaged in activities that they could use their hands and artistic creativity. With the proper assistance, I saw young children could learn some technology skills such as spacing, capital lock, and save and print files. I could tell that drawing is an integral part of beginning writers’ writing because they used the drawings to organize their thoughts about what their pets looked like. Certain students had an easier time to use the mouse drawing their pictures with more details while a couple of others had a harder time to manipulate the mouse. With some more practices, they could all do a good job. Since they could all color and add more details later, nobody worried about how their pictures turned out.

If I ought to re-teach this lesson again, I will make certain changes. The first one is that I need to be more specific about the drawing directions because some students touched other useless buttons and had to redo their pictures. The other thing is that I could have let some students use the classroom computer for their cover pages. That could have saved some time and the whole class could have completed their cover pages earlier.