Today I took my second full Key Stage 2 assembly of the week. Yesterday I spoke to the 240 junior children about my trip to Qatar, it was great to have an opportunity to talk with them as some of the topics of WISE were itching away in my mind.

In Monday’s assembly I showed some of the national flags of people I had met, and we talked about the meaning of some of the designs. Today we connected even further with people in my Twitter network. Before the assembly I asked:

3773905213_f05ccf7d43_o_normaltombarrett For #tomsassembly 10.30am GMT pls answer Qs: Location? Weather? What food represents your country/region? pls RT

I set the question before I left for school at around 7.30am and was delighted at the massive reaction from so many of you. With all of the responses I wasn’t going to be able to include all of them in the 15 minutes, so we talked about the weather in various parts of the world and then I set some challenges. (Thinking about it, World Cuisine would be a great curriculum topic to do – connecting to other classrooms, trying food, learning about different countries, Cooking Mama…)

I asked each class to find out more about a range of different foods that were tweeted my way.

  • Y3 – Musselburgh Steak Pie (Scotland)
  • Y3 – Maple Syrup (Canada)
  • Y4 – Nasi Lemak (Malaysia)
  • Y4 – Cockles and Jellied Eels (Essex, England)
  • Y5 – Melton Mowbray Pie (Nottinghamshire, England)
  • Y5 – Haggis, Neaps and Tatties (Scotland)
  • Y6 – Dim Sum (Hong Kong)
  • Y6 – Henderson’s Relish (Yorkshire, England)

A BIG thankyou to all of those who took a minute to send me a reply, the responses about food created a Twitter Smörgåsbord and it was so much fun seeing all of the different foods mentioned. I am looking forward to seeing what the kids find out when they report back.

The title of this blog post is the hashtag I used for the responses, it allowed me to quickly get to just the replies I needed and in fact some people just tweeted without sending it to me, I was still able to pick them up with the hashtag. Great tip to keep track of conversations etc.

I have archived the hashtag using Twapper Keeper but it is not appearing yet, you can also access all of the responses in this Google Doc. I have deleted the retweets so you are just left with the information on location, weather and food. I thought it may be a useful little source of information for others too.

In the past when I have used Twitter for a classroom activity or assembly other people have found it useful when I write about where their 140 character contributions fitted into the bigger picture. The combined effort of small contributions can have a big impact.

Once again a big thanks for helping with my assembly today if you did, the children were excited and keen to learn more about the different foods and there was even a round of applause at the end.

After we had finished I spent another 5 minutes talking to at least 10 children who wanted to tell me about their personal links with different parts of the world. I think the assembly got them thinking beyond our cultural boundaries and that’s what I was aiming for.

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