Families of Herkimer Central School District second graders received custom ornaments made by students this holiday season to add to their Christmas trees or other displays.
Students worked with art teacher Heather WheelerStapf and Herkimer technology integration specialist Richard Mathy to make ornaments based on their memories of a favorite winter activity.
The ornaments included student artwork of a winter activity on one side and a QR code on the other side that links to a video of the student talking about the winter activity.
“I hope the students will always be able to look at their ornament and have a wonderful memory from their childhood,” WheelerStapf said. “They all did a great job on their drawings and story of their favorite winter activity.”
Students drew the images for the ornaments themselves, and then the images and the QR code to the video recordings were burned into wooden ornaments using a Glowforge laser printer.
Second graders were able to practice various skills during the project because they wrote about their favorite winter activity and then read their comments in front of a camera, Mathy said. The project involved using Flip to record the students and generate the QR codes.
The idea to create the holiday ornaments was a spin-off of wooden snowflake ornaments that Mathy and WheelerStapf teamed up on for a project with third graders last school year, Mathy said.
Students gave the QR code ornaments to their parents and caregivers as gifts over the holiday season.
“What parent wouldn’t want to see their kid on a tree?” Mathy said. “You can always go back to that video no matter how old you are.”
Herkimer Central School District second graders recently created ornaments that had their artwork of a favorite winter activity on one side and a QR code linking to a video of them talking about the winter activity on the other side. This picture shows one of the student drawings of a favorite winter activity and how it looked after it was burned into a wooden ornament using a Glowforge laser printer.