Awesome Emoji Summaries!

After reading this blog post from Erintegration, I was super excited to try one of her emoji activities. Kids are tested-out right now, and using emojis seemed like a fun, engaging way to have them "tell" about themselves by using creativity and problem solving skills to choose emojis that best demonstrated their answer to each survey question.

I purchased her Emoji Summaries kit for $3 on Tpt, and gave it a go in Mrs. Chase's 2nd grade classroom today. The kit comes with teacher instructions, as well as explicit printable instructions so that the kids can walk themselves through each step of the lesson.  I didn't model or demonstrate how to complete the task; I explained what they would do and showed an example (there is a printable example in the kit).

I was curious if they would be able to independently follow the instructions, or if they needed help. A good chunk of the students were able to read the instructions and complete on their own, but enough needed help, so that I would recommend using a tool like Reflector to mirror your iPad and walk students through the process - especially the first step of scanning the QR code, choosing their survey background image, and saving that image to the camera roll of the iPad.  (I swear this sounds much trickier than it really is LOL!)

This project is completed using the free app PicCollage Kids, and is set up in such a way that teachers do not need to know how to use the app in order to be successful.  The instructions are VERY helpful and easy for the kiddos to follow.  At first, there were a few students who wanted to be "silly" with the emojis (OF COURSE they used the poop emoji!), but after the initial excitement over actually being able to use the emojis died off, the students worked really hard and were incredibly creative in figuring out appropriate emojis to use to demonstrate an answer to each question.  They were super fun!  The students posted their completed projects on Seesaw by saving the completed images to their iPad camera rolls.