With Year 1 doing their Minibeast topic, I had to make a link and explore the book. We had read it through and used some of the brilliant Talk4Writing techniques to help us retell the story. To engage the children further, we decided to create our own version of the story starring Year 1.
To do this we used the masking tool with the brilliant Doink Greenscreen app. This short video demonstrates the process:
Once all the children had created their video on Doink Greenscreen. We put it all together in Apple Clips where pupils could also add emojis for all the food. This was their finished video:
I can't wait to use this idea with other areas of the curriculum!
You may remember a project I did with Year One last term:
I decided to do a similar project with Year Three for their science topic about the Human Body.
We started with the Curiscope Virtuali-tee. This amazing augmented reality t-shirt never fails to create a lesson of awe and wonder! If you've not ordered one of their t-shirts, I would highly recommend it. Buy a t-shirt here.
As a class, we explored all the different parts of the body and used the guide to learn facts about how our body works and what each organ does. The children were then given a part of the body and given some more time to find other facts about it.
Using the app Chatterkids Pix, the children had to create animated videos sharing their learning.
The students also used Greenscreen to create images giving the illusion we could see inside their body. Using Seesaw, they labelled all the different parts of the body:
To link everything together, we used the app Thinglink. This allowed all the pupils to embed their videos onto their labelled picture to create a whole class interactive guide to the body. This video explains the process:
I've just returned from the best holiday with my amazing family in Florida. We had such an amazing time.
While having a chat at night with my brother we got onto the topic of making a Podcast. My younger brother works as a HLTA in a primary school and from sharing stories about life in the classroom, we decided to give it a go. And so I am proud to introduce:
The idea of the podcast is to share funny stories from the classroom. What makes teaching one of the best jobs in the world is that no day is ever the same, and some of the things that happen and what children say keep us laughing through the current stress and pressure of our profession. We want to use this podcast to bring humour back into schools and show its not all doom and gloom.
We want to hear from you too! What stories do you have from the classroom? Please share them here:
So we have just released our first episode. If you have an Apple device, you can listen to it here:
It is also available on SoundCloud:
It is also available on Audioboom:
We would love to know your thoughts and would love your support, so if you do like the podcast, please subscribe, rate and review.
Ever since John Murray (@ReadingExplorer) visited our school around 5 years ago, our school's approach to reading has changed massively. One aspect of the training which has really engaged our teachers and students was the use of picture books as a stimulus in English. It is something we have embraced right from EYFS to Year 6 and every class do at least one unit of English based on a picture book.
Since then, there's been a wealth of resources and support for using picture books to inspire English. One of my favourite people to follow on twitter is Simon Smith (@SmithSmm) who, for me, is like the guru of children's fiction. I was truly inspired by his session at Reading Rocks around the brilliant Arthur and The Golden Rope picture book. Click the picture to read Simon's blog post on this:
Year 4 have started looking at the beautiful book 'Flotsam.' Having explored the first few pages, we decided to create short videos telling the story in our own words.
To do this, we used the app Clips. I have blogged about this app previously and the potential to this app is huge. This app is quickly becoming one of my favourites in the classroom. The only downside is that it needs iOS 10 to run. A lot of schools I work in still use slightly older iPads where it isn't compatible. As an Apple app, it is almost like a condensed version of iMovie. It is a fantastic way to create visual content and allows you to add subtitles, different effects and filters, stickers, labels and it very easy and straightforward to use.
To let you into a little secret, it is the app I use when creating a lot of content for my social media channels.
With the app, the pupils recorded themselves narrating over the images from the book and even use their fingers to zoom in or pan across the image. The text labels were a great way to add speech bubbles and thoughts to characters and scenes. It meant the children could animate the pages from the book to create their own comic video of the story. Rather than describing this anymore, it is probably easier to just show you one of the children's finished efforts:
For me, this is a brilliant way to allow children to explore, predict and infer about texts in particular picture books.
Recently, I was asked to write an article for Teach Primary magazine alongside John Murray (@ReadingExplorer.) The topic was to explain the pedagogy behind the Read Write Perform approach. You can read the article here:
A big focus with Read Write Perform is to get teachers to value oral speaking skills and demonstrate how much speaking and listening benefits other areas of the English curriculum. I see with many schools the constant accountability of work in books through Book Scrutinies is forcing many teachers to neglect this part of the English Curriculum. This was something I discussed in Episode 1 of Taking Teaching Back:
The obsession with work in books can create barriers for certain children if writing is something they struggle with. I have seen this in maths and reading especially. If the only way a student can show their understanding and reasoning is by writing it as a full sentence in their book, it may look like they are struggling if writing is challengeing.
Through technology, I have found this can remove that barrier for certain children. Tools such as the iPad allow students to record themselves discussing, explaining and reasoning which can be evidenced through apps like Seesaw.
I wanted to share a recent example of this idea using a new feature to one of my favourite apps. Thinglink is a FREE app I have used for years. It is a brilliantly creative app where students can add digital content onto photographs. There are plenty of examples of how we have used the app in class, which you can read here.
With a recent update, they have now added the feature of adding audio tags. So students can record audio and embed it onto a picture.
I decided to use this for some comprehension using the song I blogged about recently:
After listening to and discussing the song, I challenged my Year 4 pupils to orally deconstruct the lyrics using Thinglink. I shared an image of the lyrics and the children added oral notes deconstructing, inferring and exploring vocabulary and word choice. This was then saved to our School Thinglink account where it was linked to the student's Seesaw profiles.
Here is an example of their finished work:
This idea would easily lend itself to maths with children using the same strategy to evidence their reasoning with different questions and problems.
The students loved the opportunity to really delve into the text and discuss different key elements of the song without worrying about their writing. Of course, this wouldn't be something I would do all the time, but as I discuss on my training all the time, the key is balance.
