Northwestern Middle School Computer Labs - Language Arts

Welcome back to my discussion of the Northwestern Middle School Computer labs.  Today we are going to look at the language arts lab.  There are so many images you can use from the Cricut carts.  I read one teacher talking about how she is tired of using Locker Talk and Learning Curve carts.  While I found those useful, I found great images on the Sentimentals cart and so many more.

Yesterday I talked about the computer words in each lab. You can see my post here.  In addition, I decorated using websites likely to be used by the students working on language arts projects.  Some of the websites in this lab were Biography.com, CitationMachine.com, GrammarBook,com, DistinguishedWomen.net and Shakespeare.org.uk. The websites were cut using Arial font because it is the same as the default font for browsers.  These sites were interspersed between the computer terms and a few graphics.

In this lab I used books and writing graphics.

I especially liked these images next to the Shakespeare.org.uk.  They came from the Cricut Sentimentals cart.  I used a sharpie in my Cricut to write "ink" on the ink well.  The pen is three separate pieces of vinyl, light gray for the spine and nib, white for the feather and black as the base. Each of these pieces fit on one 12 x 12 piece of vinyl.  I used Oracal 631 for all of my images.  This is the same as "Cricut Vinyl". I purchased the vinyl from Craft Vinyl.  Nick did a great job of getting me what I needed in a timely manner.  He does it all so give him a call if you are looking for vinyl.

This is a close-up of the dictionary from the upper picture.

I love the way these books turned out.  I cut each book in a different color of vinyl.  You can't use hide contours because it is all one piece.  The only way I could make this work was to "hang" the books off the edge of the mat in Design Studio or waste a whole lot of vinyl.  First I cut a book and then I replaced the blade with a mini sharpie.  I've been coveting the Chomas pen holder and the Cri-Kits but I don't have either of them.  I used a sharpie with a pencil grip around it.  I wrote the names of the books read by the students at Northwestern Middle School.  This picture is a little bit difficult to read but the books are:  The Hobbit, Little Women, Call of the Wild and To Kill a Mockingbird.  I also cut the book mark in burgandy.  The base is black and was cut as large as possible on a 12 x 24 piece of vinyl.  Each book was then cut to fit the base.

Because this is a computer lab, I put the computer from Cursive 101 in the lab to show word processing.  I thought about putting a type writer but felt like I had enough with all the other graphics.

For this lab, I used Cursive 101 for most of the images.  The stack of books, open book (I didn't get a picture of it), dictionary and computer monitor all came from Cursive 101.  The mouse can be found on Animal Kingdom and then Sentimentals rounds out the room with the pen and ink.

Please join me tomorrow so I can show you the timeline in the main lab.  It took the majority of my time and has a lot of different pieces.