Sunday, 28 June 2015

One slide magic

The children in my class are now confidently using the site to access their learning. I have put together a movie showing you how they go through the site, find their follow up activity and complete their task in Explain Everything using a variety of tools.
The best part about this resource is that it can be used in other aspects of learning but children must have a solid foundation in using the tools in Explain Everything to be successful.

Monday, 15 June 2015

Not too young to learn......

At our last toolkits session at Stonefields, teachers from other clusters shared their experiences and success stories about children using digital devices in the classroom. I was really impressed  with how they were using their class sites for learning. I thought about it and decided to try it out with my Year 1's. So, for the last two weeks I have been teaching children how to use my class site to access their Explain Everything activities. I started out  by doing it group by group  during  my reading lessons. It took me a few days to learn how to link the Explain Everything activities and make it accessible to learners. Mrs. Belt was very supportive in helping me with my site and answered all my questions. Her video clips were very useful and I still refer to them when needed. Some of my more capable children are now using the site independently and they are now supporting the others.

The amazing thing about using the class site is that now some children have started using the site from home to extend their learning. My next focus is to encourage other parents to use the site to continue to help their children in their digital learning journey.



Reading activities.

Maths activities to practise number knowledge.


Follow up tasks assigned to groups when  children have
completed their Explain Everything activity.

Tuesday, 2 June 2015

Literacy with Gwenneth Phillips

I have been using Gwenneth Phillips Litearacy Programme in my class over many years. I have attended all of her tutorials and am very lucky to have received this amazing knowledge from her personally. In my classroom, I continuously  used her strategies and prompts to help children become confident and independent readers.
At Point England School we have been revisiting Gwenneth's Programme as part of our inquiry focus.
Today our focus was looking at readers between the Blue and Gold levels.
Please read through the slides and I hope it will improve your teaching practise.





Tuesday, 19 May 2015

From concrete to abstract

Maths group lesson:
These children are using  counters to work out a simple addition problem using the tens frame. Once they were confident using materials we tried similar addition word problems on our iPads. The children had to make two different coloured counters and then duplicate more counters to complete the word problem. Duplicating counters helped them work out how many more counters they needed for that equation. They worked really hard and they can now do this task independently as a follow up activity on their iPad.

Using different coloured counters
to work out problem on tens frame.

We practised a few word problems.
We then tried doing word problems on our iPads
Connor finds it easy to  duplicate counters and is
highly focussed on his task.
Teokatai is thinking carefully about the
amount of counters  he needs for this problem.

Izaiah worked hard and now he can do it all by himself.

Monday, 11 May 2015

Making groups of Ten

My maths focus for this group was making groups of ten and finding out how many tens and how many ones there are  in two digit numbers. We were learning to make a group of ten, then duplicating it to make more groups of ten. We went onto learning how to copy and paste shapes  from one page to another which made it much easier. At first it was quite challenging but with practise and support we got better at it.




Tuesday, 5 May 2015

Making patterns

The children have been learning to copy the pattern using their iPads. It involved using a number of tools and we had a good opportunity to practise using these tools and consolidate our learning. We then had to create our own pattern and explain it to a partner.
This is Kiarah's pattern. She worked really hard and had to think carefully
about how many pictures she needed to duplicate and also how to make it fit in the screen.

Rafayal created this pattern using shape, colour
and the duplicating tool.

This is Kristopher's pattern. He duplicated the pictures to create
his own unique pattern.