Primary Teacher UK

The Education Bill

The Education Bill has been published, along with the Governments own guide to it.  So what does it say?

Aspiring Heads

I came across another blog today - IAPS Aspiring Heads.  It's a great blog, posted to a couple of times a month, with some news and links to relevant articles for both teachers and heads.  The latest article posted talks about how spending on books is drawfed by spending on ICT - linked nicely to World Book Day on 2 March.

What does IAPS stand for?

Another Link

This link is an Amercian site from Marcia - All The Daze.  This site is contains numerous activity ideas for "All the DAZE" you spend with children.  There are 3 sections, Toddler, Preschool and School age.  Although the site seems to be specifically written for parents rather than teachers there are still some good ideas, especially for the foundation / KS1, such as the stretching exercises,   There is also some good information on child development, although again this is written more for parents rather than teachers. 

SATS as entrance test for University?

With Secondary schools soon be held accountable if the brighest students do not go on to get three As at A level under a scheme to be introduced by the government's specialist schools trust it will make it much easier for universities to latch on to bright pupils before they reach their teens.

But many critics, according to the Guardian, feel that this will lead to universities "cherry picking" the most gifted children when they are just 11. They argue that it will turn the final-year primary school exam into an entrance test for university.   

Well said to Dr Dunford on the BBC website who says: "These are primary school children. They are too young to deserve this kind of pressure."  The children find the pressure bad enough - how are they going to feel with their pushy parents saying their whole future rests on it!

Sparklebox and Groeswenphil Music

Over the last week I've been contacted by a few people to mention links to their sites.  Here are two of them:

Samuel has contacted me about a new resources website for infant teachers.  SparkleBox Teacher Resources has one aim: to share successful teaching ideas and resources with practitioners across the UK, and the world.  It provides free downloadable resources as well as links to other relevant websites. As the site is only 'Beta' at the moment and still undergoing a trial, there are still many more activities to be added. This is were you can help - they need comments and suggestions from fellow teachers to help enable them to provide the right resources.  If you have a spare few minutes, please visit the site and take a look at the downloads and email them back and let them know what you thought! The site address is: http://www.sparklebox.co.uk

The second site, Groeswenphil Music is from Philip Edwards a teacher at Cwmaber Juniors in South Wales.  This site is for the musical among us and provides a collection of fine tunes for the performer who has already learnt the basic techniques and fingerings. Each site features music and background midi files for you to play along to.  The site address is: http://www.btinternet.com/~groeswenphil/

More tomorrow...

Back from Holiday

I'm back from my week away in Scotland so updates will start again tomorrow.

Online Surveys

Ever fancied giving the children a questionnaire but couldn't be bothered collecting all the results, why not try an online solution. There are a few examples available, but two that I want to mention are RSVME and Free Online Surveys. 

RSVME is a great free application that makes obtaining feedback from pupils/parents a snap! You can quickly and easily put together a questionnaire on any subject, from the best time for football practise to what pupils enjoy/dislike in school. Then select names out of your address book you want to send the questionnaire to, and send or direct your pupils/parents to the correct internet page. It's that simple! You get the response back in one simple-to-read report which can be loaded into Excel and graphed.

The problem - there is a five question limit on the software.  This is so it doesn't conflict with their core product: www.websurveyor.com (which is expensive). 

For larger surveys you may want to try something like http://free-online-surveys.co.uk/.  There software allows you to create free surveys of up to 50 respondents for 10 days. For larger requirements you have to upgrade to the low cost survey extra package (there is a discount for teachers though).  This allows you to survey thousands of people for as long as you need. 

I think it's an interesting and more exciting way to gauge children's/parents feedback than the standard letters we send out.

Scottish Children's Book Site

A new site, BRAW (Books, Reading and Writing), has recently been launched in Scotland aiming to help parents, teachers and children access information on Scottish children's authors, illustrators and their books.

Currently the site includes a database of over 900 books searchable by title, author and age-range.  There is an illustrator of the month (is there an author of the month?) as well as a resources section and fun section, although these are still in their infancy.

Simpsons Target Cards

Following on from Little Miss Teacher's post on Apple Targets I created some of my own targets for my Year 5 / 6 writing set based on the Simpsons. 

I made 37 targets which the children can use to improve their writing.  Each of the targets is on a small A6 lamanated sheet, velcroed to the wall.  (Hint: Staple the verlco onto the wall otherwise you'll end up with ripped backing paper!)  At the start of a writing session the children collect a target off the wall which they want to work on during their writing.  Some children I obviously give guidence to on which target they should choose!  If enough targets are available then some children choose two etc.

During the writing session the children are constantly reminded to be checking they are hitting their Simpson Target.  When all is finished the targets are velcroed back onto the wall for the next session!  The children love it when they're told that Mayor Quimby want's them to use complex sentences etc!

I have two versions of these files, both as PDF files:

• Large - Each target is on a seperate A4 I used these when I was explaining the targets to the children.
• Small - There are 4 targets per A4. These are the targets that I laminated and put up on the wall with Velco.

Please note that the images have been downloaded from The Simpsons Gallery.  I have tried contacting the site numerous times via email to see if I'm allowed to offer these images with the targets from my site but have had no reply.  If they do contact me to ask me to take down the files I will obviously do so straight away!

Please ask other people to download from the original site as it gives me the incentive to do more things like this!  If you do produce the targets for another year group / subject any chance that you could email me back a copy so I can use them if I change year! :-)

You may still find the following pages useful:

• Printing 4 small Simpsons cards to a page
• Downloading the Simpsons Font

And finally the Word files:

• Download Simpsons Numeracy Targets (thanks to David Arthur)
• Download Simpsons Story Writing Targets.doc

And some extras kindly donated by you:

• Simpson Nutrition cards by Kim Vale.
• Year 3 Simpson Literacy Target cards by Jo Bell.
• Year 3 Simpson Numeracy Target cards by Jo Bell.

Happy Birthday to me!

Happy Birthday to me!  It's the half term and my birthday - what more could I want.  I'll be busy over the next couple of days so posts will be limited.  Have a good break for those that break up today.

Andrew