Lined Paper For Promethean Board

[Rosalyn Pomposo]

Doyou need a music staff, some grid paper or even line paper to help you and your students during lessons? The Whiteboard affords you several options for tailoring the background while working. The backgrounds and line colors are changeable and the stretch feature allows line sizing to be adjusted.

The Promethean Whiteboard comes preloaded with charts and templates and has a robust menu with many tools for creating lessons to ignite a desire to participate. Any of the charts and templates can be quickly added and resized for your needs. If you have saved any images to your ActivPanel via the Screen Capture app or through other methods, those are available for use in the Promethean whiteboard as well. Have some PDFs that you would like to include? Either take a screen capture when opened on the ActivPanel or save it as an image file and load it via a USB drive. All images saved directly to the ActivPanel can be added to a whiteboard lesson and resized in the whiteboard.

Do you have lessons created in ActivInspire or programs like PowerPoint and you are looking to use them within the PWB? No problem, saving them as images allows them to easily become a part of your whiteboard lesson.

When adding images to a Promethean Whiteboard lesson there are some nuisances to keep in mind. Added images stack on top of one another, no matter where they are placed on the canvas. Meaning, the first image to be placed on the canvas will be on the bottom. The feature allows for images to be moved in front of or behind other images.

Saving Promethean Whiteboard files is easy. Access save options by selecting the three vertical dots from the whiteboard menu. Keep in mind, .pwb files can only be opened on an ActivPanel. Saving the whiteboard as a PDF allows you to share the PDF file with absent students or colleagues or even use as a lesson plan template as you present.

Are you ready for a deeper dive? Education Consultant and Camp Promethean Counselor, Xan Roberti spends a 30-minute session expertly guiding you through the process of creating a highly interactive Promethean Whiteboard Lesson.

When presented with new material, standards, and complicated topics, we need to be focused and calm as we approach our assignments. We can use brain breaks and focused-attention practices to positively impact our emotional states and learning. They refocus our neural circuitry with either stimulating or quieting practices that generate increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, where problem solving and emotional regulation occur.

A brain break is a short period of time when we change up the dull routine of incoming information that arrives via predictable, tedious, well-worn roadways. Our brains are wired for novelty. We know this because we pay attention to every stimulus in our environment that feels threatening or out of the ordinary. This has always been a wonderful advantage. In fact, our survival as a species depended on this aspect of brain development.

When we take a brain break, it refreshes our thinking and helps us discover another solution to a problem or see a situation through a different lens. During these few minutes, the brain moves away from learning, memorizing, and problem solving. The brain break actually helps to incubate and process new information. Consider trying these activities with your class:

Squiggle Story: On a blank sheet of paper, whiteboard, or Promethean Board, draw one squiggly line. Give students one minute to stand and draw with their nondominant hand, turning the line into a picture or design of their choice.

Opposite Sides: Movement is critical to learning. Have students stand and blink with the right eye while snapping the fingers of their left hand. Repeat this with the left eye and right hand. Students could also face one another and tap the right foot once, left foot twice, and right foot three times, building speed they alternate toe tapping with their partner.

Mental Math: Give a set of three instructions, counting the sequence to a partner for 30 seconds. Example: Count by two until 20, then count by three until 50, finishing with seven until 80. Switch and give the other partner another set of numbers to count.

Invisible Pictures: Have a student draw a picture in the air while their partner guesses what it is. You could give them categories such as foods or places, or other ways to narrow the guessing.

Research repeatedly shows that quieting our minds ignites our parasympathetic nervous system, reducing heart rate and blood pressure while enhancing our coping strategies to effectively handle the day-to-day challenges that keep coming. Our thinking improves and our emotions begin to regulate so that we can approach an experience with variable options.

Colors: Visualize colors while focusing on the breath. Inhale a deep green, and exhale a smoky gray. Have students imagine the colors as swirling and alive with each inhale. If a student is de-escalating from an angry moment, the color red is a great color to exhale.

The Deep-Dive Breath: Have students inhale for four counts, hold for four, and exhale for four counts. You can increase the holding of breath by a few seconds once the students find the rhythm of the exercise.

Energizing Breath: Have students pant like a dog with their mouths open and their tongues out for 30 seconds, and then continue for another 30 seconds with their mouths closed, taking short breaths with one hand on the belly. We typically take three energizing pant breaths per second. After a full minute, have students do the deep-dive breath.

Sound: The use of sound is very powerful for engaging a calm response. In the three classrooms where I teach, we use rain sticks, bells, chimes, and music. There are many websites that provide music for focus, relaxation, and visualization. Here is one of my favorites.

Rise and Fall: As we breathe in and out through our noses, we can lie on the floor and place an object on our stomachs, enhancing our focus by watching the rising and falling of our bellies.

Paige: The kids were really excited to write a story, especially when they found out it was going to be sent to the author and illustrator of The Weird Series. As far as the characters were concerned, the kids knew each character well and when we started discussing what the book was going to be about they would start to reference characters from the different Weird Series books in regard to a situation they were trying to explain. I think they surprised themselves with their ability to tell a story. A lot of them asked if we could do it again because they had so much fun.

Paige: Here at York we worked on the story during our library time. Each class meets forlibrary once a week for 30 minutes. I divided the story between three classes: one class would write the beginning, one class would write the middle, and one class would write the ending.

Tim: I pulled up a Word document on the promethean board and kids started raising their hands and sharing ideas. My job was to capture the story that was taking shape. We wrote and edited together as we went.

Paige: I hooked a laptop up to my Promethean board so the kids could see what I was typing as they told me what to type. I am a big supporter of letting kids be as creative as they can be so we "popcorned" out ideas and sentences as we went.

Tim: I met for lunch and conversation with six students who seemed to put the most effort into a questionnaire I used at the end of a classroom lesson. Together we brainstormed the idea for the title and everyone wanted Emily to be in the book. Other characters came into play in whole class instruction. One student suggested the name Jeff as a code word for Jefferson. Another student suggested the name Ty as code word for Tigers (our school mascot) That was impressive to me. I never would have thought of that!

Paige: We did a recap of what a bully, victim, and bystander were, who those characters were in the Weird series, and what their motivations/resolutions were. Then we did a rough outline of what we wanted our story to be and went from there. I wrote down all the characters and ideas we brainstormed so that each class could see what the other was thinking.

Tim: My role was facilitating respectful discussion which was not difficult at all, and limiting the amount of characters and events that occurred. It seemed it would have been easy for it to turn into a full-length novel!

Paige: I think my biggest role in this was guiding the kids and keeping them on track. As far as the story itself was concerned, I let the kids just flow with it. Each class wrote their part at the same time as the other classes. I made sure to read what the other classes had written to each class as I worked with them so they had an idea of where the other classes were taking the story.

Paige: Once we finished the story, I divided it up onto pages the kids could illustrate, then divided the kids into groups so they could work on the illustrations together. It truly was a group effort! Illustrating took another 2-3 weeks.

Paige: Time was the biggest challenge! Especially since I still wanted the kids to be able to find and check out books during their library time as well.I found it so interesting the different characters the kids came up with and the situations they put the characters in. I think the one that was most profound to me was they chose to have the principal not believe the kids who were getting bullied. So often we tell them to "Tell an adult! Tell a teacher! Tell your principal!". But what happens if those people don't believe you? It seemed like a very real concern to them. I was also impressed that they chose not to get the bully in trouble for something he didn't do, even though it would have been easy to do so. Kids never cease to amaze me!

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