Month: November 2009

Maths Maps – Data Handling in Nottingham

Mapping, MathsPublished on1 Comment on Maths Maps – Data Handling in Nottingham

I thought I should bring things a little closer to home with the latest resource in the Maths Maps series. Please take a look at this set of learning outcomes or objectives from the Primary Strategy that might help you figure out what placemark icon you need.


View 7 Data Handling Activities in Nottingham in a larger map

As with the other resources they are all available on the Maths Maps page.

Please consider taking a minute to add a placemark with an activity on something you spot in the city. There has been some great additions already – I look forward to seeing this develop and I hope you find it useful.

Reading My Blog Differently

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Since I have moved this blog to it’s new home here at edte.ch I have noticed a significant change in the way that you, the reader, explores my content. It is all down to the scrolling banner at the top.

The banner is part of my theme Mystique and can be switched on or off in the settings. I can set it to display a random set of 5 posts from any category. I decided that I wanted to make a new category called “Featured” so I can have a range of posts appear in the banner. I needed to reorganise my categories anyway so I went through and added the category to those older posts that I consider still useful.

I immediately noticed in the blog visitor statistics the individual page loads had really increased. Here is the data from my old blog.

Page Loads ICT in My Classroom

Although the chart range is different, here is the data from this new space.

Page Loads edte.ch

You can see the page loads have shot up and that is all down to the simple little banner. I have always struggled with the best ways to highlight to readers older posts that are still relevant and useful, such as our Google Docs work. This certainly seems to be helping and I hope you enjoy some of the older things I have written about.

Sealife Action Text

LiteracyPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Sealife Action Text

Learning a short piece of text has proven really valuable to many of our Year 5s who find it harder than others to begin their writing.

An action text is a short, simply written, piece  that allows us to add actions to represent the words. We would learn the text and the actions as a whole class, inviting the children to suggest memorable actions for the major words. We had lots of fun doing this and even came up with a “link” action (hands clasped together) to show the connectives in the writing, such as “and” and “before”.

I invited the children to create little doodles above the words to help them remember them too. Here are some examples.

Action Text 1

Action Text 2

During some lessons we worked on taking some of the simple sentences and improving them by adding some more descriptive vocabulary or more detail. The text we used for Sealife was a general piece of description that could be used in other ways – a flexible set of ideas.

We had been looking at scuba diving underwater signals and the children have been developing their own. This worked nicely with our action text as we used some of them to reinforce some of the language in the passage.

You might wonder if learning one piece of text leads to lots of the same pieces of work. However we spend just as much time extending and personalising the text as learning it verbatim. Those more confident writers stamp their personality on it and we tend to see glimpses or phrases from the Action Text in their work.

Some children just find it very difficult to begin a piece of writing, draw upon example ideas or even remember modelled writing from the teacher. We have found that the children needing the most support have recalled this Action Text really easily giving them a great starting point for their writing.

Shapes in Paris – NEW Maths Map

Google Earth, Mapping, MathsPublished onUpdated on1 Comment on Shapes in Paris – NEW Maths Map

Hot on the heals of Measures in Madrid here is the next addition to the Maths Maps series. Shapes in Paris makes the most of this beautiful city and the maths that is visible in Google Maps.

SHAPE IN PARIS

View 24 Shape Activities in Paris in a larger map

I have had a lot of fun exploring the city from above! One facet of Google Maps is Streetview which gives us a wonderful 1st person view of the city streets. I used this same view to set some questions about what could be seen.

For example, here is a Police car and on the bonnet is the mirrored word Police written in block letters. Some of the letters are great examples of regular and irregular shapes.

Streetview Shape Questions

From space we have zoomed right down into some lettering which can only be about a metre across! This is the sort of detail that Streetview offers us and our students and I would love to see more Maths Maps questions using Streetview.

In the last few days I have heard from a few teachers in my Twitter network who have used the Maths Maps idea already with their classes and it is thrilling to here it making a difference in other classrooms.

That is the very reason why I share my ideas here.

Using Endless Ocean (Wii) in the Classroom – Making a Class Aquarium for Descriptive Writing

Games Based Learning, LiteracyPublished onUpdated on8 Comments on Using Endless Ocean (Wii) in the Classroom – Making a Class Aquarium for Descriptive Writing

I remember when I first explained on Twitter we were doing Sealife as our next topic I was sent a link to this beautiful footage of the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan. Put down what you were doing, take your shoes off and watch this for four and half minutes.

This main tank, the ‘Kuroshio Sea’, holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and is the largest in the world. Beautiful footage.

After a few weeks of working with the Wii game Endless Ocean in our literacy unit I planned for a descriptive writing task using an “Aquarium View” of one species. Here is what I did to set it up.

(I have the Wii projected onto our SMARTBoard, audio through speakers etc)

  1. When the children discover a new or interesting species that would make a good written piece of description, make a note of where it is on your map. Press 1 on the remote to call up the map. I used the Lionfish and the Red Stingray.
  2. For your writing task move the boat back to the exact spot of the species you are interested in and dive down.
  3. Set up the task by swimming to the creature, highlighting and selecting it using the A button. In Endless Ocean when you selected a creature in this way you zoom into a first person view and focus on it wherever it moves. You don’t have to control the view it will stay locked on until you manually move away by pressing B on the remote.
  4. This is our “Aquarium View” the fish moves around and we can remain watching and exploring everything to do with it, without the distraction of moving the diver or trying to follow it.

  5. Once we had our “Aquarium View” ready I worked with a small literacy group and spent some time encouraging to the children to just quietly watch the creature move and begin to think of words that might describe it’s behaviour. “Ripples” was a lovely one for the Red Stingray. We gathered these ideas on small pieces of card and had them scattered on the carpet in front of the IWB.
  6. In addition to the creature’s movement we described the general physical appearance and also more descriptive words for it’s movement – so the Red Stingray “elegantly ripples“. Reading the factfile for the creature in the game also allowed us to glean some more ideas. (Click on the name once in “Aquarium View”)
  7. After some teacher led vocabulary work I set the children off to independently create some short sentences describing the creature. I supported some individuals in this small group at the point of writing.

The children enjoyed writing in this way, they were regularly looking up at the creature in front of them and then returning to their description. It is not surprising really because we saw the same reaction to writing when we used Google Earth to offer children a visual map for their writing.

Controlling the diver and playing the game has been a great motivator and way to engage the children, but this more passive use of the media is equally effective. Due to the accurate, high quality representation of the sealife in the game we were able to just sit back and watch – our very own class aquarium.