Popplet and Pizza

So how does a pizza and attacking multi-syllabic words go together you are wondering?  You don't eat a whole pizza at once, in one bite and if you don't know a long word (multi-syllabic word) you don't try to read the whole thing at once.  You break it down (slice it up like a pizza) and read it (eat it) bite by bite!  It's gotta be in kid language so they get it!  :)

My groups in grades 1-3 need a lot of practice with breaking words into syllables to try to read them.  First response for most of them is to just guess and keep reading.  But they need  to be taught strategies and they need to apply those strategies.  And guessing isn't one of them!  We have been using this app, Popplet, to help us break our words (slice them up like a pizza).  It is great!

The kids are interested in anything done on the iPads, of course.  So they really liked doing these activities.  They did need a little time to explore and play with the app.  But then they had it and were doing really well breaking their words and reading them.

With this app, you can create as many Popplets, or boxes, as you need.  And you can resize them to what you want.

My first grade groups needed to go back and do some more work on story events.  So we used the Popplet app to do that.  We used 3 boxes after reading the story, The Snowstorm.  The first box was for the beginning, then second was middle of the story, and the last one was for the end.  

Students did a quick sketch in each box to represent what they would write about on their B-M-E page.  It helps them to organize their thoughts before writing and to remind them what it was they wanted to put on paper.  This worked really well for that.  

I can see we will be using Popplet a lot!  There are many other ways to use it.  What are some that you are using it for or could see using it if you were to download it- it's free?  Let's share some ideas!