Free 100th Day Resources

Hi all,

Today we celebrated our 100th day of school with some cute activities. All of the resources I used are free, so if you're planning on doing something similar, please download!

We have been marking each day of school by placing a star sticker (Tiger's finest!) on a chart that I downloaded for free from First Grade Bloomabilities. We wrote the M, T, W, Th or F on the stars to make sure we didn't forget a day!

First, we made some 100th day crowns to wear for the day. Each child had a thick strip of white card (I cut A2 lengthways) on which they wrote "It's my 100th day of school." I measured and stapled them while they decorated 10 strips of coloured paper with 10 symbols/pictures/numbers/words. They then glued the bottom of each of these to the inside of the white band and glued them all at the top. I would recommend reminding the children to try and make sure the coloured strips are all the same length or you'll have a few wobbly crowns!

After the crown-making, we carried out some investigations based on the number 100. Another hint: Don't use a bag of microwaveable popcorn for the "unpopped popcorn" investigation. It's covered in some sort of lardy substance! I made this sheet to suit my class. You can download it for free from Google Drive by clicking here or on the image below.

While the children were making their hats, they passed around my iPad and used an app called Aging Booth to make photos of how they would look when they are 100 years old. As I don't want to upload any of my pupils' photos here, have a look at mine as an example!

I printed these (It was very quick to paste the pictures into a blank Keynote presentation and email it to myself as a PDF) and the children stuck them into this (free!) "When I am 100 Years Old" writing frame from The Teachers' Guide.

Next, we did 100 exercises. I chose 10 children to suggest an exercise and we did 10 reps of each.

 Finally, we did some 100th day challenges, some of which were from The Brown Bag teacher's free 100th Day resource pack.

Criminal words - overused words - display

We're working on storytelling lately and I wanted something to help build the children's vocabulary and make their writing more interesting. I thought this was a lovely display idea with substitutes for overused words. You can download the banner and the word mats for free from Teacher's Pet. They also have editable "swag bags" so the children can generate their own substitutes and write them on coins. 

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!),