Thanksgiving with Educreations Technology

In November, I introduce my students to the story of the Pilgrims and the Thanksgiving Story. There are so many concepts about this story that are hard to teach to this age, so I do keep it relatively simple. This year, I chose to introduce it using a great free website called Educreations. Educreations is an online interactive whiteboard that supports four colors and works similar to a screencast. The teacher presses the record button on the screen at the top right of the screen and draws or writes on the whiteboard.  As the teacher speaks into the microphone while writing on the whiteboard, the lesson is captured for viewing later. The initial writing can be done with the class and used later for review or it can be created prior to class and be used as a means to introduce a concept. 

Also, another nice option this site has is that you can create "courses". For the Thanksgiving lesson, I created a Thanksgiving course and drew several different pictures for different parts of the story. In kindergarten, the attention span is small, so that is why I broke this story up into segments within the course.

I am attaching it free here for you. It was the first one I created and I did it while I was teaching my class, so I had to do some classroom management (you know, the "teacher eye" and some pointing...) while drawing and speaking (and trying to stay on topic with a subject that is at times, difficult for a five year old to understand), so please just enjoy the concept and try it out for your own class. If you like the lesson, you can share it with your class. Each part of the lesson has to be opened separately. There is no "erase" option to "wipe off" the whiteboard, so each scene had to be done separately.

Another really neat option for this site is that you can add a question and answer interaction at the end of the lesson!

I would love to hear how you could use this in your class! 

Enjoy!