Antonyms+and+Synonyms

When coming up with an idea for my project, I looked at Indiana's Academic Standards for inspiration. There is nothing like a boring academic standard to get your mind working on creative ideas to help children learn. The English/Language Arts Standards for Grade 3 state one of the standards should be to "determine the meanings of words using knowledge of synonyms (words with the same meaning), antonyms (words with opposite meaings)." http://www.doe.state.in.us/standards/docs-English/2006-06-ELA-Grade03.pdf

My project starts students thinking about antonyms, or opposites. At the beginning, they can look at pictures to determine opposites, or antonyms. This should help visual learners. Next, they can find word antonyms. Finally, they put these words into a sentence. The drag over to hold and select option should be familiar to third graders and not present too much of a challenging computer situation.

I used the text box creator on Microsoft paint to create the words. Then, I highlighted them and copied them as a jpeg. They are viewed as pictures in the document, making them easier for students to move around when matching and creating sentences. The pictures are Clipart, and I used audacity to create the audio files that I inserted into Powerpoint.

When I created the powerpoint, I included synonyms in the pictures and words as well. This made it easy to convert the project into a learning tool for synonyms as well as antonyms.

I think the best feature I created in this project was the sentence former, which is similar to magnetic poetry. I think it would be fun to create more templates with this feature.