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Science
What Planet Are You From?
Jan 18th
We used Voicethread today for some work about planets in our solar system as part of our Superheroes work. Generally we have used it to support speaking and listening prior to a fiction writing task, but it is equally effective in gathering and sharing research and factual information.
The children worked in pairs on a laptop – opened up the Voicethread we had created and used Planet 10 from the Planet Science website as the main source of information. Not only is this a great interactive model of the solar system but it has information about each planet presented in different ways.
Children also gathered information from other information websites tagged with “planets” on our Delicious account. They then added that information in written or voice form to the Voicethread. A simple way to create a pooled information resource which is presented and created in different forms. As I said in my Teachmeet Takeover talk at BETT last Friday, Voicethread allows children to work together in an open way. They can see everyone’s comments and contributions updating in real time – they can tap into the information others find as well as share their own.
Our next step will be to personify the different planets as Superheroes and link the physical features we learn about with some superhero powers or special abilities.
I like to use Google Earth when talking about the rotation of the Earth and the sunlight layer, shown in the image below helps to model this even further. “What happens in between the dark part and the light part?” a question from one of the children was a good discussion starter.
Another feature of Google Earth, that is often unexplored, is the different things you can view apart from the Earth. These are Sky, Mars and The Moon. Looking closely at The Moon there is an abundant set of information about the various lunar missions, landings and physical features.
We discussed the size and scale of the craters we could see (we found one that was 115km across!) and also tracked the route the Appollo 15 Rover took on the surface.
High resolution panoramic imagery is also available dotted around these landing sites and is a fascinating glimpse into the lunar landscape.
It made me think about combining some of the digital storytelling ideas that we have done using Google Earth and use Google Moon or Mars as a science fiction bachdrop. The incredible imagery would certainly be a great starting point for descriptive writing about a setting.
Health and Fitness – Smoothies and Food Groups
Nov 25th
Our current curriculum theme is Health and Fitness, which has naturally been led by Science and PE. This week you would have delighted in the image of me attempting the double cross skip!
It comes with a pretty high difficulty rating! We were all outside doing a big year group skipping session which has proven a lot of fun over the last few years.
I did manage it though and along with some of the children I think I am getting better each week. It is all part of our efforts to get the children enjoying exercise and keeping active.
We have been learning about food groups today and also different fruit for healthy smoothies we are designing. Our specialist art teacher is covering the design of packaging and we are looking at the smoothie ingredients.
To assist with this we have been doing fruit tasting and exploring the various nutritional value of fruit. Smoothie Operator is a lovely little smoothie simulation tool that we have had fun using. From the Science Year website (which is well worth exploring), it allows you to create a smoothie from all sorts of different ingredients from the different food groups.
We challenged our children to make the most UNHEALTHY smoothie they could. Once blended (and we have done the little blending dance, play the game you’ll see!) you can then find out about the various levels of SALT, SUGAR, FATS etc. Useful for the children to see the colour coding as it is the same on most food packaging in the UK. We then tried to make a super HEALTHY smoothie as well.
Today we looked at the food pyramid and the children made their own using SMART Notebook. We reinforced this with a couple of little games that they really enjoyed. The first was Monster Nutrition from the Nutrition Explorations site run by the US Dairy Council. It is a bright and fun site, and the Monster Nutrition game has more depth than most.
You have to grab different food from the conveyor belt in the foreground and fire it at Mungo the nutrition monster! When he gobbles it up it gives you information about the food group and then some further multiple choice questions. The kids enjoyed this one and had to choose something from each part of the food pyramid to progress.
Another US site we have used is MyPyramid.gov and the Blast Off game which asks the children to plan a whole day of meals and exercise in order to fuel a rocket to Planet Power. There is great depth and detail in the information provided in the game. It is engaging and reinforces: food groups; nutritional values; balanced diets and the need for the right sorts of food throughout the whole day.
I like the fact the children need to consider the different amounts from each food group and strike a balance with them all. They can also choose from a range of exercises to go along with their meals. As the children add their food items the game alerts them to alternatives to butter for example, or congratulates them for choosing whole grain. All good messages provided in a very good little game.
I just thought I should share these with you as they are new on my radar for this year. Don’t worry, more skipping updates soon!
3 Video Resource Sites to Support Maths, Science and Spelling
Dec 4th
There has never been a better time for finding online resources to support learning. I subscribe to the RSS feed from my delicious network and my Google Reader is regularly bulging with useful links to sites that can support the work going on in the classroom. Here are three highlights that use video as the central media to help support curriculum work.
Spelltube brings the weekly spelling list into the technological age.
Spelling videos have been created for each of the 3000+ words in the National Spelling Bank, from which teachers can generate and assign a word list to their Key Stage 2 pupils. Memorable characters help to reinforce spelling concepts in an enjoyable way that will appeal to various learning styles.
The site allows a teacher to sign up for a free class account, which then provides children with individual login details. Spelling lists can be assigned and scores tracked within the site. It is tailored towards the UK national curriculum and supports the spelling objectives within it. I think it provides a great alternative toSpelling City.
The idea of SIMPLE SCIENCE is to have informative music video presentations for use in the primary school classroom.
They are designed to be used as part of a lesson to reinforce learning objectives and scientific concepts and also as a useful revision tool for the SAT exams. They work particularly well on a large whiteboard but can also be viewed on the computer screen and TV.
Once again the resources support the Key Stage 2 QCA Science units in the UK and each of the sections provides a video of the science behind the topic and a song to help the children too. The films can even be bought as a DVD or the songs on CD. There is no sign up or login needed to watch the films.
The site uses Vimeo embedded films and you can see Simple Science on Vimeo here. The fact they have not used YouTube makes it much more accessible in schools. Apparently they have a whole stack of early years songs and films planned for next year which should be worth looking out for.
Learning Clip is an online resource to support teachers, teaching assistants and parents implementing the renewed primary mathematics framework.
The resources are structured to follow precisely the learning objectives of the renewed framework. For ease of navigation the resources are also listed by topic.
They all have the same easy to use format. Each clip comprises of, a short introductory video, an interactive activity, a worksheet and a set of notes.
After an initial registration a user needs to login to access the resources. It is worth noting that on the home page it states that the resources are being made available to teachers for free “during the development phase”. I assume from this that there may be a time when the resources require a fee to use them.
During the initial development phase of the project all the clips have been freely available to anyone interested in teaching and learning mathematics. From the 16th January 2010 some of the resources will only be available by subscription. The rest will continue to be free to registered users.
I hope you find the three resources useful and find a place in your classroom for using them. Please let me know of any other video based resource sites that you know of or have found useful in the classroom.
Google Earth Wikispace
Nov 10th
At this time of year I like to look at this great resource in Google Earth I think it will be a useful teaching aid for Science.
It shows the leaf colour of major forests in and around the UK, the information is gathered from the Forestry Commission sites and layered into Google Earth. The colours will change as the Autumn season progresses.
Open this Placemark
Take a look at my wikispace for classroom uses of Google Earth for further resources.
Sharing a Google Spreadsheet in class
Sep 17th
Today was Day 1 in terms of our laptop use in the classroom and we hit the ground running, so to speak – just how I like it. I am sure you have had days like today, when it is a bit of a whirlwind from 8am right through to 4pm – where does the time go? Today the sands just seemed to slip through my fingers! Not to say it was one of the best days for a long time.
We now have 8 Toshiba laptops running happily in both of our Year 5 classes and today we kicked off with a simple word level activity in literacy. One group worked on Race to Ramses! a game about combining prefixes and suffixes to create new words. I have taught with laptops in the past but the new technology (laptops and WAPs) is just so much more reliable. And it is great seeing children completely engaged with one to one technology supporting their learning, I am so pleased to see it in the hands of the pupils – which is the whole point. You might think “web game, one group…not really setting the world alight” – but I suppose it is a culmination of a lot of work and to finally get things in front of children, reliable and solid feels like a big achievement.
Needless to say in the afternoon we swam into deeper waters and I’d like to think we pushed the envelope a bit…
The morning was successful and the children enjoyed working on their own machine and many children asked for the web address for the game – so we will have to get our del.icio.us account sorted or get them into their Google accounts soon!
In the afternoon we were looking at some science work we have begun regarding healthy living and exercise. Today we explored pulse rates and we used an online spreadsheet to share our results, hence the title of the post. (This work is similar to some online spreadsheet action we had last year with my Year 6 class) I decided to use a Google spreadsheet as I have been using the Docs application for a while (in fact I have a few grumbles about that – more soon) but you could have easily used EditGrid as an alternative – I set the sheet up so that all of the children’s names from both classes were present in the first column. Then 10 other columns were labelled, “Resting Pulse1, Resting Pulse 2…” It was in these cells that the kids added their resting pulse after counting for 30 seconds and doubling.
I then accessed the same spreadsheet through my Google login on all 8 laptops per class that I put around the room – so in effect I logged in 16 times (plus my PC and SMARTBoard, so 17) to the same document from different locations. We talked a little about how to find our pulse and then asked the children to record 10 instances of their resting rate into the spreadsheet. It was great! With the live update feature we were able to see individual results popping up all over the place and even from next door in Rick’s class who were doing the same. Google Spreadsheets has an Auto Save option which makes life much easier and gives you the opportunity to see the live data. Not only did the hardware hold out fine, but accessing the spreadsheet was excellent – even with 17 simultaneous users on a single login. The children really enjoyed seeing each other’s work and it gave them a great overview of not only the class year group working together, but also to the sorts of data people were adding. Children from the other class were nipping across the corridor and questioning the validity of results from kids in my class.
The children had a tendency to sit with the laptop in front of them, in small groups rather than freely moving around the classroom and accessing any machine. But I suppose that is due to the nature of task.
Within the space of about 40 minutes, perhaps less, we collected approximately 600 individual results all in one place. No doubt they will be quicker next time. This method of data collection also allows us the ability to then manipulate the results afterwards, working out averages of the whole year group etc. I would highly recommend doing this if you have the reliable kit in your classroom, we have already said that it will be an excellent data entry method for our maths lessons on data handling.
It is now 12 hours since I started the day at school and I am just about coming up for air, no don’t worry I am not at school still! – but it is great to reflect here on these sorts of days. One to remember and I hope you might take some of these ideas and use it yourself.
Editgrid update
Jan 4th
We got round to looking once more at our Science Online resource over at Editgrid. I had some trouble yesterday with it so I thought I could try dumping the cache in Firefox and that worked really well.
So in the morning I pasted in the data which I added to Excel yesterday and sorted out an average and simple bar graph which you can see I have linked to below, also here.
Then the other year 6 class added their own data – we watched as it updated live, the children loved it and we talked about how the graph and average were also changing.
It would be great to be able to do this with schools in other countries – after all exercise is universal! SO GET INVOLVED – all the instructions are there for you to do the short exercises and then you can add you data into the pool.
Real data we can all share; to help better demonstrate how reliability is imperative in scientific results.
Editgrid and Pulse Rate revision
Jan 3rd
Today we were back to school. We had a good day and pretty much hit the ground running.
I decided that during our revision of the human body, and specifically whilst we were looking at pulse rate we would use our Science Online spreadsheet resource to share results between the 2 Year 6 classes.
Although over the last few months we have had nearly 300 individual views and some positive comments on the resource, nobody has yet been in a position to contribute. So I thought I would look closer to home and share pulse rate data between the classes.
The important principle still remains underpinning why I want this web2.0 tool to work; that more results means more reliability. These tools have to make a difference after all.
So the children recorded the pulse rate (counted for 30 seconds and doubled) when:
- Resting
- After 30 arm circles
- After 30 star jumps
- After 30 side to side jumps
Editgrid has a real time update feature but unfortunately we had a bunch of trouble and the spreadsheet just sort of stopped updating. I decided to save our results in Excel and then import them later – you can still see our “Exercise” sheet and everything ready to go.
You are welcome to have a go and add some data – it took us less than 30 mins to gather the info and add all 30 odd sets of entries to Excel.
Let me know of any other simple experiments or investigations you and your class are doing this term that we could pool the results for.
Image Citation:
Imperial Doughnut, “Pulse” Imperial Doughnut’s Photostream. April 25 2006 <http://farm1.static.flickr.com/44/134998486_c7519227be.jpg>.
