🪩 Folklore Era 6: Grades K-4 Explore Board by Tarah Tesmer

WATCH: 2nd graders use ChatGPT to create a short story

tesmert — 2025-02-27 20:00:10 UTC

READ: Collaborating with AI: a modern approach to storytelling in the elementary classroom

tesmert — 2025-02-27 20:01:08 UTC

WATCH: Using ChatGPT and Book Creator to teach students about short stories

tesmert — 2025-02-27 20:01:46 UTC

ACTIVITY Sample Part 1: Kids Think Wide Picture Prompts

tesmert — 2025-02-27 20:04:11 UTC

Thought-provoking AI generated picture prompts, each with discussion questions and a suggested writing prompt, designed to support and inspire all writers. You can generate, edit, and save custom prompts to fit your context.

Another idea: Have students reverse-engineer the AI image to brainstorm what the AI designer's prompt might have been to create the image!

ACTIVITY Sample Part 2: My Favorite Things AI Image

tesmert — 2025-02-27 20:06:38 UTC

This is similar to our AI Alter Egos on Tour from Era 1:

Using the built in AI image generator in Canva or Padlet, students identify 5 different “favorites” of theirs and post the resulting image. A sample prompt might be “Draw a combination of [my favorite animal] eating [my favorite meal] while doing [my favorite hobby] at [my favorite place] with [my favorite color] sky.” Above are some examples of the outputs.

Then, after students have posted their images, bring up slideshow mode in Padlet and review the images and ask the students to “reverse engineer” the prompt. I like starting here as using Padlet doesn’t require student log-ins to use and it’s a very structured first use of a prompt.

ACTIVITY Sample Part 4: Recreate this picture

tesmert — 2025-02-27 20:09:01 UTC

Now that the students have built some critical thinking skills with their prompting, it’s time to put it to use. Find an image on the internet (or make one with AI) that the students have to attempt to recreate. Unlike the Google Labs activity, there is no limit to the amount of descriptive words they use. They can either use the AI image generator in Padlet or try out the other image generator from Canva. Above is an example where the goal was to recreate an image of a beach ball in a pool. You can also facilitate this as a whole class with younger learners.

Again, much like with the other activity, take time to look at the images and reflect on what could be changed and what wording could be used. Find images that match fairly close and ask the students to share their prompting strategy.

Try out an example with this basketball in a pool image.

WATCH: Exposing students to ChatGPT (5th grade example - consider something like this to bring awareness to younger learners about AI's capabilities)

tesmert — 2025-03-03 13:09:22 UTC

ACTIVITY Sample Part 3: Say What You See

tesmert — 2025-03-03 13:11:26 UTC

After they’ve done their AI Favorite (image activity), the next activity I would do is the “Say What You See” game from Google Labs. In the game, you have a limited amount of characters to try and create a prompt that matches the image shown.

You could do this activity in three parts as well. Part one is whole group, where you have the class share thoughts on what the prompt should be as a model the critical thinking process. For the next image, give the students a chance to interact with others and share what words they would use for the prompt. Finally, have the students try it individually on their computers and see how they do.