PVA glue trick

Are your children sick of trying to clean cups, pots and glue spreaders with water? Well here's a trick I learned by accident a few years' back. 

Just leave it to dry in, with the spreaders still in the cup. Then simply wiggle the spreaders and pull them out. The dry glue will come out in one clean swoop. You can then throw the glue away and everything else is clean.

Magic!

                                      

Making rounding more interesting

Hi everyone!

Hope you're enjoying the weekend! 

We're doing rounding (whole numbers) in maths next week and I've been looking around for some resources that could be used to make it a little more interesting!

Then I came across these from ColoringSquared.com:

Rounding to the nearest 10:

Images from ColoringSquared.com

Rounding to the nearest 100:

Images from ColoringSquared.com

I know the children in my class will love these. It's great to see something more interesting than just numbers and arrows!

For anybody who's introducing rounding from the start, I found this video from MathCoachInteractive. I like the way it has the balance that tips to the left or right so the number slides - very visual!

Another great find that I'm going to be using is this rounding to 20 poem number line from Twinkl.
This hundred chart with arrows from Math-Aids.com could also be a handy visual aid for children:

Image from Math-Aids.com

If you have any other nice rounding activities that have worked for you, please comment below!

Chinese New Year Guided Research Sheet

Happy weekend! 

Chinese New Year is just around the corner on February 8th. There are lots and lots of resources out there. I want my class to do some guided research about it so I've created this sheet. It has 4 links - two to websites with easy-to-read information, one to a YouTube video showing celebrations in Hong Kong and another to the story of Nian. If this could be useful in your school/home, just click here or on the image below to download it for free from Google Drive.

BETT 2016

Greetings from my couch! I'm in recovery mode after a very busy two days in London at the BETT 2016 Show. For those of you who haven't heard of it before, it's a showcase for ICT in education, formerly called the British Educational Training and Technology Show. It's free to enter (You just need to register) and there's plenty of accommodation nearby in London's Docklands.

This was my first time going to an educational showcase of this size. I was blown away by how big it was. All exhibitors, guest speakers and visitors wear ID badges and you could spend hours just people(and badge)-watching alone. There were so many people from different sectors of technology and education.

It's easy to get overwhelmed when you first walk in. There's so much going on and so many people wandering around and handing you free stuff. Just look at this haul! (And that's after I did a cull and got rid of loads!) 

Once you get into the swing of it, there's so much to see and do. There are seminars to attend, stands to look at with interesting demos. And you'd never know, somebody might even grab you to film you talking about your reaction to it! 




Anyway, moving on to my (less superficial and more educationally-minded) discoveries and experiences from the event. As you know if you're a regular follower of this blog, we've really made a push to get our children coding at our school. One of the first exhibitors that stood out with this in mind was SAS apps. They provide a (paid!) service, App Camp, in which children can create their own apps and share them within a school's own web app.

We also came across these friendly, blue robots, Dash and Dot. These allow for simple programming with young children. They reminded me of BeeBots and BlueBots (more about those later!). However, the same exhibitors gave us a quick demo of Makey Makey.  This allows children to experiment with programming, engineering and art. They can turn everyday objects into touchpads. 
















I particularly like this Makey Makey banana piano from their website!

Image source: MakeyMakey.com

One of our stops was at the Lego Education stand where we signed up for a workshop on the new Lego WeDo version 2.0. We already have the original WeDo kits at school but it was great to see that this one has a wireless bluetooth smart device and can be programmed using iPads. This is a massive advantage for schools/clubs who have more iPads than desktops available for coding!

The curriculum pack comes with easy-to-follow lessons with open-ended tasks. We tried out the first task and had great fun learning through inquiry!






Another point of focus I had in mind was looking for ways to get our youngest children using technology in different ways (including coding). The TTS stand provided lots of inspiration for how to build up a bank of supplies to share within the school. Here are some of the resources I found interesting. The Blue-Bot is a great way to teach the really little children how to do simple coding and they now have a TacTile reader (see the picture below!).

I really enjoyed the demo of the Zu3D software for making stop motion animations. It's very child-friendly and has lots of different features. You can even film the model with a green screen and put it on a photographic or hand-drawn background. It would be fantastic for integrating writing, oral language, visual arts and even music. Again, this is not free, so I'm definitely going to look into what options would be available for doing stop motion animation within the classroom.

So there you have it, a brief look at just some of the things we saw this weekend. I would highly recommend the BETT to anyone with an interest in ICT. The dates are already set for BETT 2017 so do have a think about it!

Art inspiration: Rich McCor AKA Paperboyo

Hi all,

Happy New Year!

I stumbled upon an artist online before Christmas and have been following him on Instagram before Christmas. His name is Rich McCor AKA @paperboyo

He uses cardboard cutouts to transform famous landmarks into something else. My personal favourites are these two of L'Arc du Triomphe and the London Eye.

image source

image source

I'm sure the children in your class would have great fun trying to recreate the school building, something in the yard or something at home (homework!),

Happy Holidays!

We did it!!! We finally made it! Here's to a happy Christmas spent with your family and friends! No doubt you've worked hard this year. Now enjoy the holidays - eat, drink and be merry! I'm off to do the same. 

See you in 2016!


*graphics from My Cute Graphics
*fonts from Kevin and Amanda

Christmas Symmetry

Less than a week to go to the Christmas holidays! We've just had our dress rehearsal and are looking forward to our show on Friday. Here are some pics of how we did a very Christmassy but still a "real" maths lesson. 

I showed the children how to do four symmetry activities - an angel on a grid in pairs and a Christmas tree, a snowflake and a bauble on a grid independently. They began with the paired activity and then chose the order they did the other activities. They listened to Christmas songs and drew/cut away happily.

Here are some of the children finishing a symmetrical angel in pairs and a bauble independently. I got the angel and bauble from Activity Village. 

 

Here is one of the children's Christmas tree. I showed them how to do their half-tree shape on the board and they got cracking on their own.

 And here are two of the very unique snowflakes they made. They're so simple - start with a circle template, fold in half three times and then cut out bits of it.