Category: Literacy

A Quick Roundup

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Lots going on recently so I thought I would just write a quick roundup…

Parents Evening Can you guess what it is?

Last Thursday we had our first parents evening which was really positive and for the first time I discussed our class blog with some of the children’s parents. The response, from the people I spoke to, was very positive and I was pleased about their reaction to it. We talked about a task that I had set on our History topic using the blog. I posted an image of a mystery object which I wanted the children to investigate and find out what it was. I set a simple reward for correct answers posted to the blog. Kids and parents loved it. I will be definitely doing more in that vein.

Macbeth timeline Macbeth Timelines

For our literacy work over the last 2 weeks we have   been studying Shakespeare’s Macbeth – the children have accessed the text through drama, character studies and abridged versions. On Monday and Tuesday this week we produced Macbeth timelines. I asked the children to look at 8 key events and pick and choose the appropriate characters and settings for them. I made a simple SMART Notebook file that demonstrated what they would do. It utilised the infinite cloner tool, so I had created a palette of characters and settings that the children had to draw from.

Poppy poems

Today the children were learning about remembrance as it is linked closely with last weekend. They looked at footage from the Pathe Film site and a short cartoon from the War Game film to add the first world war context. They then wrote poppy poems on red templates of the flowers. Next week I am planning on teaching them how to create a multimedia version of their poems using PhotoStory, should be fun.

More Bubblr

In Tuesday’s ICT lesson we used Bubblr as a tool to recount our evacuee drama experience we had with our secondary school. It was a great afternoon as it was an idea I had over a year ago and with the help of some colleagues and students from the secondary school we basically evacuated our Year 6 children for the afternoon! They had no idea where we were going and all of the teachers and students were in role when we got to the local town hall, which was also a great setting for it. Bubblr is proving a really great tool and is ideal as there is no real learning curve it is so easy to use.

Google Earth training next week which I am really looking forward to. 🙂

Shakespeare's Globe

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I do not think old Will had this in mind when he named his theatre down on the banks of the Thames but I showed my children the Globe Theatre in all it’s glory on our digital globe – Google Earth!

globetheateri

As an introduction to the playwright and his works (we are looking at Macbeth over the next 2 weeks) I used GE to explore Stratford and look at his birthplace, then we zoomed over to the banks of the Thames in London to explore the great Globe Theatre. Using the 3D models in Google Earth 4 we were able to really get a good understanding for what the building was like – and is like today I suppose as it has been carefully restored.

The children were naturally highly motivated and they loved the fact that we could even see little model people in various thespian poses on the actual model stage! One child even asked me what the play was they were doing!

I think I will use a tag related search in Flickr to get some current photos of the theatre too. And perhaps gather together the Shakespeare resources I find useful and post them up soon.

[Thanks to Frank at the Google Earth Blog for the image]

Lesson Observation Today!

Literacy, My classPublished on4 Comments on Lesson Observation Today!

It has been a while but today I was observed by my headteacher and the chair of the governors. So I decided to see what they would make of Flickr notes.

We have been looking at Goodnight Mister Tom and I decided I would setup an image of different objects that represented parts of the story. My learning objective for my literacy was:

To recap on the main events and characters of the story.

Here is the image.

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I then showed the children the objectives which I had added into notes and a short explanation of the activity. I gave the children 2 minutes to talk to their neighbour on the carpet about what they could see and then I asked the individual children to come up and add a note to an object and explain what relevance it had.

The simplicity of the tool worked extremely well and the children had no trouble adding it to the correct part of the image using the SMARTBoard, I then scribed what it was.

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After covering all of the objects I revisited our objective and scrolled over the notes we made and summarised our work together. It was a very successful recapping method which, where appropriate, I will use again in the future.

I have also just discovered how to add links within the notes so that the image becomes quite interactive – you can link to other photos, so you could zoom in to the image to look at closer detail or you can navigate out to a website with information about the subject of the note.

What fun we had…

Literacy, My classPublished on3 Comments on What fun we had…

Today we had a planned session in using Bubblr. It was GREAT !! And I would recommend the use of this little site with a whole class to any teachers out there. It was simple and worked a treat… (Take a look at my previous post explaining what Bubblr is)
If you will permit me I will explain what all the fuss is about.

We have been looking at Roald Dahl’s Matilda this week and I thought a simple activity for Bubblr would be to choose some pictures and let the children add them to the Bubblr strip and then simply add text, speech and thought bubbles. Nothing complex or anything to do with order – just to play with the interface and get used to it.
But the beauty is in the simple way the images are accessed by the children. All I did was upload them to our class Flickr account. The children search in Bubblr for our user name “priestsic6” and there we have it – all of the images in our account with the most recently uploaded heading up the scrollable list for the children to work with.

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The Bubblr strips were published and then if you click on the “BLOG THIS” button you can copy the code for embedding it. I asked the children to go to our class wikispace and embed the Bubblr strips into our literacy page. With their prior knowledge from doing the Quikmaps lesson they coped really easily with it. I was suitably impressed with how adaptable the children are. As I was walking around the suite there was that great buzz when everyone is on task and they are really enjoying such a simple but great activity.

Please let me know if anyone wants any more details about the activity or how to set it up yourself.
This one’s a keeper… 🙂

Lasso Screen Capture with website

Literacy, Maths, My class, SMARTboardsPublished onLeave a Comment on Lasso Screen Capture with website

We have SMARTBoards at school and one of the new features of Notebook 9.5 is the lasso screen capture feature. Just click on the camera icon on the toolbar.

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In our newspaper work we have been looking at the differences between direct and reported speech. A simple activity that involved the screen capture tool was that we went to the Newsround website and scanned news stories for examples of the different speech. A child then chose the lasso capture tool and lassoed (!) the part of the text, this is then captured into the notebook software and we sorted it into a table.
I have also used this tool in the past when exploring shapes in a photograph (like of railings) the children can draw around the shapes they see – these are then captured to Notebook. It is then possible to sort the shapes into different groups, triangles, quadrilaterals etc because the clipping retains the properties from the photo. In the past you could only do a square around the shape so it was more difficult to organise them after they are captured via their properties.

Here is a movie (WMV) from the Steljes site of the tool in action.