This term we’ve been looking at the Ancient Greeks and I wanted a novel way for the children to research and present their information in an engaging and easy-to-use way. Enter Adobe Spark Video! This brilliant app, lets children present their information in a powerpoint-esque style but without the difficult to use features and costly software. It…
Improve reasoning in maths
I recently got the opportunity to attend an ICT with Mr P training conference which was incredible! I came away feeling really inspired and buzzing with ideas and tried them out as soon as I got into class. One of my favourite ideas was to use the app Explain Everything to improve reasoning in maths. After teaching just over a…
Maths rap battle
In class we’ve recently covered fractions and their decimal equivalents and I wanted to find a way to try and support the children to remember 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4. I thought back to my love of Eminem and the catchy vocals and sample tracks that he used and it got me thinking… OK, maybe Eminem isn’t…
The power of Seesaw!
I’ve seen countless posts and blogs over the past few months about the power of Seesaw in the classroom and after a little bit of time getting myself familiar with the app, I downloaded it and started using it straightaway. I was immediately impressed by the speed of uploads and the user friendly interface (and best…
Growth Mindset
After doing a lot of research into Growth Mindset (Youtube Carol Dweck as a starting point) I decided to introduce the idea to the children by using the ‘Austin’s butterfly’ story. The Youtube video is available here but I created my own pictures and told them about a boy that was in my class at another school to make it seem…
Minecraft in teaching
Every single child in my class absolutely LOVES Minecraft and this got me thinking about how I could create a topic to somehow link heavily to Minecraft without it actually being Minecraft themed…thinking caps on! I decided to develop a potion/Minecraft topic which would have a heavy science theme (currently working with a Y4 class so will be…
Make your own comic
To support children to develop their script ideas (see my earlier post about using the Sainbury’s Christmas ad to inspire their pre-unit write here) I love to use online comic generators as a teaching resource. My favourite is ‘Make Beliefs Comix’. The children love to get involved and it’s easy to use both on iPad or Windows/Mac….
The Thing Explainer
OK, I’ve cheated a bit. I suppose this isn’t really to do with teaching per se, but since I received this as a stocking filler over Christmas I can’t put it down! Munroe explains brilliantly everything from the nuclear bomb to the biro using only the thousand most common words to give some really simple explanations…
Using Mog for script writing
Before I teach a unit of work in Literacy, I like the children to complete a pre-unit independent write to see what their knowledge is of the specified genre/unit. As I was about to teach script writing, I wanted to see what they actually knew about the key features so used the Sainsbury’s Christmas advert ‘Mog’s Christmas Calamity’…
Man on the Moon for guided reading
During the last week of the Christmas term I used the John Lewis Christmas advert in our guided reading sessions to develop the children’s inference and deduction skills. We watched the video once and used talk partners to discuss key questions such as: How long had the elderly man been living on the Moon and how did we…
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