What a start!

Like everyone else, the start of the new school year has been an extremely busy time.  I decided to start with a real focus on handwriting to set us up for a NEAT year.  This has been going well and presentation generally is benefiting from taking the time to do this. But I also wanted to try and get parents involved in using the learning platform fairly early on, as I knew from their previous teacher’s comments that some of them hadn’t been wholly convinced of the learning applications…… SO I put my thinking cap on and decided to use my new best friend – Voicethread! As you will know if you read my blogs from last term, I think this is an enormously powerful tool for collaboration.  So I decided to photograph the handwriting that the children did in the first couple of days and add the images to a voicethread, which we then embedded into the learning platform for ease of navigation.  I say “we”, but at this stage of the year, the children are getting their heads around what we are doing and why,  rather than how!

The children have started to add “2 stars and a wish” to each others’ writing as one of our guided reading activities – it’s a good opportunity for them to learn about how to give each other constructive feedback.  And in the meantime we’ve sent an invitation home to parents to join in the feedback! It’s great to see that some are starting to add to this.

Another thing we did last week was to start our Romans topic.  Our ICT major theme for this term is editing pictures, which I’m hoping to develop using tools such as colour magic and fotoflexer.  But to start things off, we did a little research online to find images of Roman mosaics, then used this wonderful site for the children to design their own mosaics.  This is possibly where things start to sound long-winded, but because I want the children to be able to use a variety of tools to edit images, we print-screened our designs, copied them into a publisher document, cropped and saved the image (with the children creating their own folders within the class documents area of the server to put them in).

A lot of skills used in an afternoon – amazing children! Brilliant site to start our mosaics/ICT project!

The third thing we have been doing requires its very own post – coming very soon to a blog near you!