Projector

Have you got the “new technology blues”? The ideas below will give you new and exciting ideas for using your computer and projector in the early childhood classroom. Using a computer and projector combo in the classroom will revolutionize the way you teach and the way your students learn. Using these tools in your classroom daily will take both you and your students to a whole new level of teaching and learning you never though possible.

Music:

Upload all of your music to your computer and play it through the speakers on the computer so you can get rid of your CD player. Create play lists for each of your units/themes so you never have to waste time switching back and forth between cd’s again. You can buy a PC Remote (see resources) so your computer works just like your CD player. Bonus- your CD’s will never be scratched or broken again!
Create a sight word play list in Windows Media Player using the music CD from Heidi Songs. Write each sight word on a piece of paper with a marker to use under the document camera. Have students come to the front and use a pointer to point to each letter of the sight word as the song plays.
You can also purchase e-books from Frog Street and other educational publishers to play on your computer and project so students can read and sing along to the popular Frog Street songs.

PPT’s:

Go to Kelly’s Kindergarten and Prekinders to see all of the fabulous Power Point presentations to go with popular early childhood songs. You can project these on the screen as the music plays- a very powerful learning tool. I have created many Power Point presentations to go with thematic songs as well as sigh word PPT’s using music from Learning Workshop and Heidi Songs. See the resources section below for links to all sites mentioned above.
You can also create Power Points of vocabulary words with clip art for each unit and project them in a loop on the screen during waiting or transition times to maximize learning.

Writing Prompts:

If your district subscribes to Discovery Education Streaming or Power Videos then you can show clips of educational videos to your students. The fear of infringing copyright is completely gone; by subscribing to these websites your district has an automatic license to show any video on these websites. All of the videos are aligned to curriculum and categorized by grade and topic. You can show non-fiction, fiction, Scholastic videos etc. Each video has links to teacher’s guides and correlations. You can show a video as a writing prompt to your class. For example, before a field trip to the zoo watch Goodnight Gorilla and have the students drew a picture and write about the video clip.
During a study of life cycles I showed a clip of the life cycle of a butterfly to the class to establish prior knowledge; the clip showed a time lapse of a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly- the kids were spellbound! Then we got our own caterpillars and watched them turn into butterflies in the science center.

Interactive Games: Use web sites like Starfall and project on your screen. Have students use pointers and fly swatters and point to their answers on the big screen.

More Early Childhood Technology Information