Primary Teacher UK

Design your own playground

Ministers today launched a fun, interactive website and poster campaign to encourage children to give their views on play and play areas as part of the first ever national consultation on children’s play.

The website and posters give children the chance to design their own play space using playground favourites such as see-saws and round-a-bouts mixed with more modern structures such as wooden climbing walls.

On the website children can choose from a variety of settings to reflect their local areas, with a choice of urban, rural or sports fields on which to build their ideal play area. In order to add equipment to their play space children must answer a series of questions around the idea of play. The more questions answered the more points they earn to spend on designing their own play space.

The views of children and young people will play a crucial part in this consultation, and it is important that as many as possible are able to contribute their ideas. This short, online activity is aimed at 8 to 13 year olds, will ensure that children can give their views while at the same time being creative and having fun. All the consultation questions have been drafted using child–friendly language.

Link: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/playspace/

Better Searching

We've all been there - when you just know that someone else, somewhere, has already produced the resource you need and you don't want to reinvent the wheel.

So we turn to our trusty friend Google, which offers souped up searching using cheats, some of which are listed below:

• "DFES Primary Strategy" - will only return pages with the complete phrase within quotation marks.
• define:computer - gives you definitions of a computer.
• ~counting - searches all synonyms for counting.
• KS2 Maths site:www.bbc.co.uk - will limit results to those found on the BBC site.
• related:www.primary-teacher-uk.co.uk - returns pages related to the Primary Teacher UK site.

Sometimes though, Google isn't specific enough and you might need a specialist search engine:

General Search

• Metaglossary.com - returns only definitions of words, phrases or acronyms.  This could be used easily by older KS2 pupils.
• Scandoo.com  - Safe search engine that rates page results according to content theme or how loaded with viruses and spyware they are. This uses the Google, Yahoo and MSN engines.
• Dumb Little Man (Blog)  - 20 tips for efficient searching.

Multimedia

• British Universities Film and Video Council: Moving Image Gateway - "The Moving Image Gateway (MIG) is a new service that collects together websites that relate to moving images and sound and their use in higher and further education."
• Picsearch.com - Usually returns better results than Google Images and offers much clearer thumbnail images.
• Flickr.com - literally millions of (mostly!) high-quality digital photographs taken by enthusiastic amateurs.  Try searching for your home town or topic-related images; you're sure to find thousands of suitable photographs.
• Creative Commons - searches Google, Yahoo and Flickr for media that can be used without any copyright issues.
• Findsounds.com - "a free site where you can search the Web for sound effects and musical instrument samples."

Documents

• Docufarm.com - Specialist search engine for documents (choose one of PDF, PowerPoint, Word Document, Rich Text File or all of these at once) Can be used to good effect when searching for planning and resources.

Search Engines for Children

• Yahooligans/Yahoo for Kids
• Ask for Children

On a totally unrelated and irreverent note, will extreme pen spinning become the big next craze over here?  Thanks to Andrew for sending me the link.  This is a Youtube clip and cannot be embedded on this site because school firewalls tend to block it.  It's fun though!

PS: If you do want to include Youtube videos in your Smart or Promethean documents, try using the Zamzar website to convert the video to an flv file.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q7s4E94-No

Design and Technology

There are a number of Design and Technology websites available for children and teachers to use. Most are aimed at KS3/4 but still have some excellent resources. Technology Student and Design and Technology are good examples of these sites, but both contain good sheets and diagrams/videos suitable for upper KS2.

One of the best Design and Technology websites has to be that of DATA (Design And Technology Association), covering the subject from the Foundation Stage to the Secondary Strategy. All have examples of good practice, planning; links with literacy, numeracy, science... There is also a whole page of 'challenges and competitions' that you could put into place at your school. The page provides a list of links to Challenge websites, but these do take a lot of time and effort to get up and running!

The Nuffield Foundation also have suitable alternatives to the QCA schemes of work, all with adequate planning and resources. The Welsh NGFL site has excellent resources available for the Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 QCA Units.

So...there are plenty of D&T resources available online. I always get questioned about there being a lack of websites for D&T and I hope this provides a good starting point. Also, if you know of any that enhance learning or save you time(!) please add a comment!

Paper Fun

Running out of activities to do with the Year 6?  Here's a few simple but highly entertaining and fun activites that I have done this week.  The children have really enjoyed and yet it requires nothing more than lots of newspaper, sellotape, glue and weights.

Activity 1: Create the tallest freestanding tower out of newspaper that can hold the most weight.  Children start with 1 complete newspaper.

Time Limit: 30 minutes
Initial points: 1000

Points to be lost
1m of sellotape: 50points.
Glue stick: 200points.
Extra newspaper: 500 points.

Points to be gained:
1 point for every gram held before tower collapses
1 point for every cm

Activity 2: Create a bridge out of newspaper (Must have height >30cm and width >60cm) that can hold the most weight.  Children start with 1 complete newspaper.

Time Limit: 45-60 minutes
Initial points: 1000

Points to be lost
1m of sellotape: 50points.
Glue stick: 200points.
Extra newspaper: 500 points.

Points to be gained:
1 point for every gram held before bridge collapses
500points if the bridge meets required height and width
500points if the bridge is able to freestand for 1 minute (no sellotaping bridge to floor!)

Activity 3: Create a band and play a well known tune out of only newspaper and art straws.

Time Limit: 45-60 minutes
Points: To be decided and the quality of the instruments and the quality of the tune played! :)

Bridge Building

Yesterday while being 'Big Teacher' in the classroom I set the children the task of designing and building a bridge that could hold the greatest weight from a newspaper for an observed Maths lesson.  To start the lesson off I showed the children the different types of bridge that they could build and examples in real life.  One website really caught my attention and had the children engrossed while they spent 10 minutes at the start of the lesson researching how they were going to build their bridge.

Building Big (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/index.html) is a website for an Amercian (I think) TV show and has detailed information on the building of bridges,  domes, skyscrapers, dams and tunnels.  There are detailed explanations for children on how the structures are built along with a few interesting games.  There are also links to other relevant websites on the Internet.

During the activity the children where 'charged' points for using sellotape and string etc but earned points for 'gap the bridge covered' and amount of weight it held.  The children came up with various designs including standard beam bridges, a truss bridge and a simple suspension bridge.  The maths came from the measuring, weighing and discussing of the best way to get the most points. 

The winning group produced a newspaper truss bridge with a small role of sellotape that held over 10kg!  Not that's not bad!

North East Science Centre

Taken from the NGFL website: SETPOINT North East, a regional science centre,  wants to establish a group of science, technology and maths teachers, from across the whole 4-19 age range.   The volunteers would help and advise to make sure its activities offer the best possible service. 

It should not take more than an hour or two of spare time each term and in return, it is offering to pay expenses and offer a discounted or free activity to your school. If you are interested in taking part, contact Sarah McLusky, Education Operations Manager on 01642 384262 or send an email.

The many uses of Google

 
 

 

Where would we be without Google?

Check out some of these features that Google make available via the search box. Click the links to see how the feature works and to view an example.

The Google calculator
5 + 2 x 2
half a cup in teaspoons
160 metres in millimetres

Google currency conversion 
3 GBP in US Dollars
5 British pounds in Australian money

Google definitions (type 'define: your word' into the search box)
define: blog
define: fractions

Google images (click on the 'Images' link under the Google logo and type in the kind of pictures you are looking for)
planets
picasso art

Check out the rest of Google's features here.

A Guide To Using Interactive Whiteboards

I have just read an excellent review of "How to Use an Interactive Whiteboard Really Effectively in Your Primary Classroom" by Jenny Gage, on TES Online.  This is a book for users of SMARTboard or Prometheon ACTIVboards. 

Tes Online states:

As well as giving examples of good practice, the book also sets out some of the pitfalls which can easily be avoided, once you know they are there. And this is the strength of this book - it allows you to learn from others, not re-invent the wheel.

Full of practical tips, this book doesn’t try to over-awe you with all the features, but rather to take you from familiarising yourself with the basics to a point where the IWB is integrated into your teaching in a seamless and stress-free way.

I popped over to David Fulton Publishers and discovered Jenny has also written a version for Secondary school teachers as well.  Both are £18 and come with a CD of resources.

Deb

Can a PDA help you organise yourself?

All around us technology is getting smaller and becoming more and more a part of our life. I’m a bit of a gadget man, when I can afford it(!), and buying my PDA a couple of months ago was an attempt to help me organise myself better for the coming school year.

My PDA has become much more than just a diary though and this article is quick explanation of how I’m using it as a teacher. I will also look at some of the software available to teachers to download and buy. The article focus’ mainly on Palm PDAs. Pocket PC users which have Microsoft Mobile on their PDA’s will find similar software is available to them.

Google Reader

There is a new way to read Primary-Teacher-UK and any other website or blog with News feeds. Google has just launched a free feed reader that looks very nice. If you have a gmail account (or don't mind setting one up) just pop over to reader.google.com and have a look.  The RSS feed for Primary-Teacher-UK is http://www.rossa.blogs.com/weblog/atom.xml.  Alternatively check out my article on RSS feeds for other ways to get the information to your computer.