Lots going on recently so I thought I would just write a quick roundup…
Parents Evening 
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 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. 🙂