2nd Grade

These task cards cover the basic skills a second grader should know from mousing to keyboarding to learning how to treat technology devices. 

Basic Browser Skills
Students will learn the names and functions of the parts of a basic browser window, the nomenclature, and actions.
 

Beginning Keyboarding
The goal of this activity is to provide resources for helping students build appropriate keyboarding skills and position through practice, modeling, and goal setting and monitoring processes.

       Basic Troubleshooting
       Students learn basic troubleshooting steps. 

Care For Your Device
It is very important early on that students learn how to care for their device whether it be their mobile device, their laptop, or a desktop.

Dance Mat Typing
Dance Mat Typing teaches kids to touch-type using the home-row method. This is a free online game that is a great introduction to keyboarding with high engagement.

Earth Day Fun With Michael Recycle
Students have some Earth Day fun with Michael Recycle learning about recycling and sorting while reviewing important Internet browser components and keyboard keys. 
 

Intermediate Mouse Skills
Once students have mastered the single left click, they are ready to learn what happens when they double click the mouse. They will learn the difference between the left and right click buttons on the mouse. They will also become proficient at dragging and dropping objects.

Intro to a Computer
Students will learn about input and output devices. 

Learning to Copy and Paste
Learning to copy and paste is an important skill to learn. Students will learn how to highlight text, copy it, and then paste it into a document. Students will have fun adding text to National Geographic's Funny Fill-ins and then will copy and paste the completed story into a word document. 

Shortcuts
Students enjoy being proficient in using technology shortcuts and teaching the skill to others. Some shortcuts are fairly common across all devices and applications and others are specific to a device. Being familiar with shortcuts helps students transfer the skill to other applications and devices.

Text to Speech
There are FREE amazing tools that will read text to you. These tools help students to listen to what they have written, listen to another person's work, and some will even allow you to transfer the audio to an mp3 player.

These task cards cover apps and programs that can be used across multiple age levels and curriculums. They are primarily how-to task cards on how to use the application in the classroom. 

Classroomscreen Tools for the Teacher  
Teachers are able to use this Classroom Screen in their classroom in a variety of ways. There are 21 widgets to support class activities and help students get to work. 

Communicate With Bloomz
Bloomz is a communication platform that helps students succeed in the classroom and at home. It is a great tool to use to stay connected in the school community and send real-time messages to a class or person. Parents and students can view a calendar, view behavior, sign up for conferences or volunteer work, and view photos from both the website or an app. Students will enjoy seeing the petals bloom as they watch behavior points blossom into a flower.

Communicating With Parents Using Klassroom
Klassroom is an app that teachers and parents can download to their phones to easily communicate and engage with each other. Teachers can post assignments, add events, schedule conferences, and upload pictures. This is very similar to Facebook.

Connect With Class Dojo
ClassDojo connects teachers with students and parents to build amazing classroom communities by creating a positive culture. Teachers can encourage students for any skill or value — whether it is working hard, being kind, helping others, or something else.

Connecting With Other Classrooms
Using the website, www.empatico.org to facilitate, students in the classroom will connect with another classroom in a different part of the country or world.

Create Custom Activities With Wordwall
Wordwall is a free resource for teachers to create interactive and printable activities. These can be played on any web-enabled device. Students can play individually or with each other.  

Digital Learning for Kids
e-Learning for Kids is an educational website for kids grades K-5. Lessons are organized by grade level as well as skill topics. Students can easily sort the lessons and then select the lesson they want to work on. They are guided through the lesson with a cartoon video-audio and prompts. 

Fun 4 the Brain
Fun4thebrain is a website for students PreK-5 that has many different activities in all content areas for students.

Freckle
Freckle is a FREE website that provides online learning in math, science, social studies, and English language arts. Students take a pretest and then their individualized learning plan begins.

Get Epic!
Epic! is a free online library for educators. Students are able to select from a vast selection of books, audiobooks, and videos.

Hooray! Go Formative!
Go Formative! is a web-based tool that allows teachers to formatively assess students on the fly, or at the beginning and end of a lesson. Teachers create the assessment, and students complete the assessment online. 

Make Your Ideas Pop!
Popplet is a web-based and app-based tool that allows students to mind map their ideas with user-friendly functions. Students can create brainstorming webs easily and collaboratively. Students learn about United States symbols. 

Mystery Doug
Mystery Doug is a FREE weekly video series where students ask questions. The videos are short, approximately five minutes long. 

Operations and Algebraic Thinking
Math Playground provides grade-level appropriate activities for math operations and algebraic thinking with a variety of activities to engage students and strengthen their skills. It can be used in grades one-six. 

Presenting With Buncee
Buncee is a presentation tool that allows students to create content that is unique to them and their learning experiences. Buncee offers free public domain images, the ability to embed videos, and upload content, as well as interactive materials, colorful backgrounds, and fun templates. Note: A free Buncee account allows up to five Buncees. 

Remind - A Communication Tool
Remind is a communication platform that helps students succeed in the classroom and at home. It’s a great tool to use to stay connected in the school community and send real-time messages to a class or person.  

Seeing the World With Google
Create a tour of a particular region, country, or feature (urban v. rural, communities) using the Google Earth 

Smarty Games
Smarty Games is a fun interactive website that helps to develop creativity, visualization, problem-solving skills, math skills and the curiosity for knowledge. It is very easy to understand.  It can help students be more successful with their elementary school curriculum. It is kid-friendly, safe and FREE!

Sumo Paint
Sumo Paint is a free online paint program and image editor similar to Photoshop. Flash is required for this site and ads are present.

Symbaloo For Educators
SymbalooEDU is a bookmarking website that helps teachers and students organize their favorite websites. This is a resource management tool that can be used to organize lesson plans, add links, web pages, or any other content that would be helpful for your students. You can organize the tiles by subject, grade, or however you want. 

Testmoz - Auto-graded Tests and Quizzes
Testmoz is a web tool that allows teachers to create auto-graded tests and quizzes. You can choose four types of questions - multiple-choice, true/false, multiple response, and fill in the blank. Without an account, you are allowed 50 questions for each test.

Text to Speech
There are FREE amazing tools that will read the text to you. These tools help students to listen to what they have written, listen to another person's work, and some will even allow you to transfer the audio to an mp3 player. 

Students will learn more about coding and maker resources. There are activities to better understand computational thinking and how it can be applied when working on projects. 

Abstraction
In this task card, the focus will be on abstraction one of the four stages of computational thinking. The students will learn how programmers hide all but the relevant data about an object in order to reduce complexity and increase efficiency.

Algorithm
Students learn about algorithms one of the four stages of computational thinking. Students learn how to write a detailed step-by-step instruction set or formula for solving a problem or completing a task.

Composing and Decomposing Numbers
The Starfall Compose & Decompose numbers game is a great option for practicing adding, place value for ones and tens, and number identification in a steady, consistent format. 

Dashing Through the Code
Students will use knowledge of coding to code through various holiday programs from Code.org and Google. 

Decomposition
 Decomposition is the first stage of computational thinking. Students will learn how to break down a problem into small chunks. 

Gamify Robots
Learn how to use your Robots (e.g., Code and Go Mice, Dash, and Spheros) by gaming. Gaming creates a high-interest, team-building, and problem-solving approach to using the robots, and the games are easily adapted to most robots and many levels.

How Many of My Friends?
Students will design a survey to explore their classmates' feelings and experiences with bullying. Once the class has participated in the survey, they will analyze the data, discussing implications and how they can improve/build the classroom community.

In a Pickle With Math
Math Pickle is a resource filled with math puzzles and games to engage students in problem-solving. Puzzles are organized by grade level and subject.
 

Keva Planks
Children love to build! The Keva Planks have become very popular to use in classrooms. KEVA planks are about 1/4 inch thick, 3/4 inch wide and 4 1/2 inches long.

Let's Learn to Play Chess
ChessKids is a website that teaches children how to play the game of Chess. It walks them through the game, has tutorials, puzzles and involves the child. It helps to keep them motivated as they are learning the game and improving their skills. It also helps with critical thinking skills.

Lightbot Coding
Coding or programming is the way that we as programmers, can tell a computer what to do using instructions that the computer will understand. The instruction for coding can be either in words or icons. Lightbot is a programming puzzle game.

Ozobot Snowman
Students will use previous knowledge of Ozobots and coding to color code a path in a maze to create a snowman.
 

Ozo Shapes
Students will use previous knowledge of Ozobots and coding to color program their Ozobot to run correctly through the maze.

Pattern Recognition
Being able to recognize patterns is one of the fundamental steps in computational thinking. Patterns can help with efficiency, solve a problem, and allow for operations to be repeated so time is saved. In this task card, the students will learn how to look for patterns. 

Unplugged: What is Computational Thinking?
Computational Thinking and coding go hand-in-hand. But what does it mean to think computationally, and how do we introduce this type of thinking to students? In this unplugged activity, students experience what it’s like to be a programmer while they code another student to complete a drawing.  

These task cards are activities to assist the student to creatively communicate and present in different ways. 

Book Creator Global Collaborator
Book Creator is a simple and free online app that even very young students may use to make interactive multimedia-rich eBooks. Students access the site via a code provided by the teacher and the publication is limited to only those that the teacher chooses to share the book with. Alternatively, it may be downloaded as a PDF. 

Communicate With Bloomz
Bloomz is a communication platform that helps students succeed in the classroom and at home. It is a great tool to use to stay connected in the school community and send real-time messages to a class or person. Parents and students can view a calendar, view behavior, sign up for conferences or volunteer work, and view photos from both the website or an app. Students will enjoy seeing the petals bloom as they watch behavior points blossom into a flower.

Communicating With Parents Using Klassroom
Klassroom is an app that teachers and parents can download to their phones to easily communicate and engage with each other. Teachers can post assignments, add events, schedule conferences, and upload pictures. This is very similar to Facebook.

Community Connections
In this activity, second-grade students will connect virtually with one or more community members such as police chief, city manager, librarian, or mayor in order to discuss their roles and responsibilities. Students will keep track of what they learn in order to create a poster describing the person and everything he/she does to help the community.

Connect With Class Dojo
ClassDojo connects teachers with students and parents to build amazing classroom communities by creating a positive culture. Teachers can encourage students for any skill or value — whether it is working hard, being kind, helping others, or something else.

Creative Writing Collaboration
Storybird is an online community that provides original artwork to inspire students. The artwork sparks their imagination and supports story creation. Collaboration can take place when students invite others to work on their stories with them.

Guess My Animal
Students will complete research about an animal of their choice using the San Diego Kids Zoo website. The students will create a slideshow presentation to share with the class teaching about their animal. 

How Full is Your Bucket?
Students can brainstorm ideas to help others in the community and address and potentially solve some of the issues. The teacher will use mind mapping tools with the students to capture thoughts and ideas. 

Kid Publishers
The students will use AbcYa! Story Maker to create a published writing piece along with a digital artifact that demonstrates learning of a concept.

Presenting the Presentation
Students will design an effective presentation on which to share key information regarding a given topic or subject. Care will be taken to ensure that the presentation is visually appealing and contains a variety of images, graphics, and text. 

Publish a Story With Google Slides
Students will use Google Slides to publish a writing piece by typing their story, adding images to their slides, and creating links for readers to navigate their published book.

Puppet Show Creations
Sock Puppets is an iPad app that allows students to make their own puppet shows in seconds. Students can add puppets, props, scenery, and backgrounds while incorporating their own voices to their show.

See What I learned
Students will demonstrate learning by designing a slide using a collaborative presentation tool, such as Google Slides.

State Research using Chatterpix
This project is modeled after a book called The Scrambled States of America by Laurie Keller. After reading the book students will create their own state and make it come to life. Students will research a state of their choice. They will collect basic facts about their state including what region it is a part of. Then they will evaluate their facts to decide which should be shared.  They will use an app called ChatterPix to share their work.

You Are Your Words
It is important for all students to express themselves in a positive way. This activity has the students creating a Word Cloud with words about themselves.

Design Thinking is a process that teachers use to take a structured approach to generate and develop ideas. The task cards in this area help teach the design process. 

Is This a House for a Hermit Crab
Students will use design thinking to build a house for  a hermit crab or another animal.

Tell me Why Design Thinking
In this activity students will be challenged to engage in design thinking as they use logic and their imagination to solve unique problems. Students will be tasked with creating an object specifically designed for a given character.

These task cards teach students about art, photography, videography, music, etc. 

Autodraw
Autodraw is an Artificial Intelligence program from Google Labs
Students will love the ability to doodle and then pick the shape the program thought they were drawing. 

My Singing Puppet Show
Lower elementary students love to play with puppets. Students will learn how to coordinate their puppet movements with their singing voices.  By choosing their favorite nursery rhyme/song, small groups of students will practice with a proper singing voice and then add the puppet movements.  The final step is for the group to “perform” their puppet show and have another student record the performance. Students could also add “sound effects” to the performance that they have recorded.

Puppet Show Creations
Sock Puppets is an iPad app that allows students to make their own puppet shows in seconds. Students can add puppets, props, scenery, and backgrounds while incorporating their own voices into their show.

Stop Motion With Koma Koma
Koma Koma is a great application for an iPad or tablet. It is a quick and easy way for beginners to create stop motion videos.

Sumo Paint
Sumo Paint is a free online paint program and image editor similar to Photoshop. 
 

These task cards have activities to teach students about how to be a good citizen, stay safe on the Internet and prevent bullying. 

Be Polite
In this lesson, students will watch a video about polite Internet behavior (netiquette). They will engage in a class discussion about proper online behavior.

Bullying No Way
It is so important that students learn about bullying at an early age. They need to learn what bullying is and how to respond to it. 

Stay Safe on the Internet
Students need to learn how to recognize inappropriate materials, not talk to strangers and let a grown-up know if they encounter anything that appears to be wrong.