Bits & Bobs

Last week the World of Goo was installed in our ICT suite and my class had their first explore last Wednesday at the end of their ICT session. Their task in that lesson was to create number bond games to 10 for Y1 using 2DIY but what they were more interested in - as soon as they logged on - was the new icon on their desktop! A few of them have this game at home and couldn't resist telling the class it's 'PIPS!'....Their current favourite word for 'WOW! - AMAZING! - FANTASTIC!'...I hadn't planned on them using it last Wednesday but such was the buzz that I had to promise them 10 minutes at the end of the lesson to explore...providing of course that their 2DIY number bond games were made and saved....which of course they were. So I let them explore and decided to talk about the game afterwards.

Basically the World of Goo wants you to build a structure to enable little chattering goo balls to be able to reach a pipe. You need enough goo balls to go into the pipe so that you can go on to the next stage of the game. It's very inventive because each stage is a bit different and hence requires deeper/different thinking to solve the problem of how to get the goo into the pipe! They keep adding new elements...whistling, balloons, motion....etc etc

I love the game that's shown in the image below. This requires you to create motion! You need to attach the balloons to the structure on the left to make it airborne, you then need to work out that it has to move somehow to get to the other side so that it can pick up the goo balls that are asleep! Once the structure is airborne you need to take a balloon off and quickly re-attach it to create a circular motion that'll make it move! Once you've done this enough times to get to the other side, you then need to take the balloons off so that the structure will go down (don't bin the balloons...love and cherish them.. ). The goo balls then attach themselves happily and after that you need to re-attach the balloons (even more of them because it's now heavier), do the circular motion thing to the middle, take off balloons so that it sinks down to the pipe that takes the goo balls...! Wow! Took me ages...I figure that if I am learning how to think from this game then the impact will be huge on the children!


Back to the ICT suite....as they explored I walked round the suite and tried to talk in 'maths problem solving' language to help them work out what to do. I'd told them the basics - goo needs to get to a pipe via a structure that you need to build - some children needed a little help to get the idea and then they were off!

What's the clue? How do you need to think about 'xyz' to help you solve the problem?

What do you need to do differently this time to try to solve the problem?

Why didn't your idea work last time? What could you do differently next time?...etc

Afterwards I talked about why I'd let them play a game in their ICT time- that solving maths problems is all about thinking... What are the clues? What kind of maths do you need to do to solve this problem? If you read a problem and it doesn't make sense then is there a different way of thinking about it that could help you?..etc - so that they understand why they are doing this. Next week I plan on having a Goo session followed by a problem solving session in maths to start to evaluate my idea that this will help their understanding of how to think to solve maths problems.

Be aware that the 'undo' function creates a flash - might not be suitable for all...we had to check it out with a parent...

If you google 'World of Goo recommended age' you'll see it's an 'E' game. On amazon it's got a PEGI rathing of 3 which means it's suitable for all ages. One I found recommended that it was for children over 6, some recommend that older children will get more out of it and I agree as it gets more difficult as it goes on. I think the 'summer' section is suitable for my class as it's not too hard and that they will understand how to develop their thinking into other things from it.

It's early days yet but I plan on relating their 'games based learning' thinking to their maths lessons and evaluating the impact. If I get it right then I think it will be a great help! I am also hoping it will help develop their memories. Once you've learnt what to do in a particular game it helps if you remember what you did the next time.... as with maths problems! A very current, enjoyable medium to develop thinking skills and learn about how to 'think outside the box' to solve problems!

Every January the RSPB has it's Schools Birdwatch (Jan 18th - Feb 1st) - if you visit their website they have many lovely ideas that you could use in school. This year they are also doing a Little Schools Birdwatch which again has many good ideas to use in your class. I tend to do the Big Garden Birdwatch which is next weekend so that I can set it as homework - not just the bird watching but also as data handling revision of the information they collect. I think that it's also important that the children realise that birds need our help to survive in bad weather such as the snow we've just had and I've been encouraging them to leave out food.


The Year 3 classroom has windows that look out over our school meadow, this means that I can hang feeders from the trees which can clearly be seen from the class. I've not been able to get into the meadow recently with all the snow but finally last weekend I stocked up the feeders and put out many of those half coconut things.

We're now starting to get the birds back and we often have 3 or 4 male and female pheasants sitting on the wall staring at us all in class! I'm hoping that next week we'll have several more species of bird for us to identify and I'll have a different bird each day as background on the IWB to help them to be able to recognise the birds more easily.

So, onto science. Our science topic this half term is 'materials' whch fits very nicely with making bird food! We use lard, cheese, raisins and sunflower seeds and put them in a plastic pot with string for a hanger.

Lard is malleable and soft, the plastic pot is waterproof and strong, the string is flexible and strong, we need scissors to cut the string - hard, sharp and strong, cheese is for protein and if you use cheese string it's flexible and malleable and the raisins provide sugar and again are very malleable!

It's a great activity to apply their learning in this science topic, it's also fun - try washing your hands after making balls of lard!....and it's very useful as the birds get a tasty ball of food!

I've just signed up to do a teach meet presentation on Thursday (THIS Thursday...mad woman) and have decided to do a completely non-whizzy/techie presentation about my thoughts on how to teach WW2 to Year 3. If I get my act together I might learn to use Prezi to help things along...but I might not. I've decided to blog about it to collect my thoughts and work out what I might say!





Then there's 'Hide-away Day.' When I taught about Anne Frank I wanted a way to make it come home to my class how difficult the 'hiding' must have been. How difficult not to have fresh air, how difficult to leave all theri friends, how difficult to be quiet all morning- most mornings. ...how difficult to live for 2 years in such a confined space....

I blacked out the classroom (link to science (materials) and checking out which material was the best for a blackout using a data-logger) one night after school. The next morning I brought them in urgently...EVERYTHING had to be brought in, it had to appear to the rest of the school as though we weren't there. Blinds were down, dim light in the classroom, no IWB on. I explained in a hushed whisper what was going on, they had to be quiet (tough call) all morning, no noise for fear of being discovered...They also had to amuse themselves apart from one set task - a diary. They had to write about what they thought/felt at the beginning - at playtime when they were missing their 'basketball day.' and at the end of the morning.- Each day a class gets the basketball court as their special area - mostly boys play football and girls try to avoid the footballs!..I picked their day on purpose, hoping that missing something they loved would help them to understand to some extent how hard/difficult life must have been in the Annexe.

I'd also arranged for a member of staff to knock loudly on our door...the class froze!! We later discussed this - how must it have felt in the Annexe when they thought they were about to discovered? Indeed how did it feel when they were discovered?

Toilet watch was a popular job - they had to work out when the best time was, try to be quick, not be seen and definitely keep an eye out!...

All in all I think this worked, they really didn't like missing their football time - this was ONE 20 minute session in their life - Anne Frank spent over 2 years cooped up and missing her life...their diaries were good, full of thoughts and feelings, especially about missing their playtime and what might have been happening! As the morning went on it became harder for them to keep quiet and there was a big sense of relief when it was all over. It's so difficult I think for us - in this world we have - to really have any idea of what that must have been like....

So - WW2, 'real' videos, living history and a bit of a creative idea...feel free to steal!

I first saw this video this morning and was absolutely wowed by it....I've watched it twice since then! A talk by Kiran Bir Sethi from India at the first TEDXorenda event at Bett 2010 about the 'I can' bug infecting the world! So inspiring...do watch it!

Thanks to Nicola for letting me hi-jack her blog today!

I've been following a fair number of inspirational teachers through Twitter for a while and hopefully contributing along the way too. After the continuous disruption from the weather recently, I've been paying close attention to those posting about online lessons, lurking in the background, dying to do one of my own!

This morning, I got the call to say school would be closed today, so I thought it was now or perhaps never. I decided to use 'Coveritlive' following David Mitchell's (http://mrmitchell.heathfieldcps.net/) success last week. I set up a simple account, had a practice and wrote a brief lesson plan with links and resources ready to upload.

My first problem was how to put the word out there. We don't have a parent messaging system, so I posted on our website (in the area announcing the snow closure) and emailed all the KS2 children. I also got in touch with all the teachers...more about this later. I have a fairly active VLE in Year 5, so it wasn't long before I had a few children emailing me, so I asked them to spread the word too.

1pm arrived and the lesson went live. Coveritlive, enables you to approve comments before they are posted, so you have to be quick - sometimes the conversation looks a little out of sync as you post your main bits and others are still commenting on what went before. However, I feel this all adds to the 'virtualness' of the lesson.

I used a simple image to inspire some sentence work, leading to a more polished opener. I also used a virtual jigsaw to get them hooked. If you get chance take look at the replay, please do, I'm really proud of some of the work and most children went off wanting to finish their stories.

My online lesson is here!

I had 11 'readers' on line and my TA, but that will not stop me trying out this type of activity as I have got so much out of it, as have the children.

Thanks to Dughall and Nicola for the collaborative learning between our two schools today also - I'm amazed at how a seed of an idea can grow into an oak tree of reality by lunchtime.

Last night the heavens opened and let out their snow again which meant that we were shut as it was all very dangerous out on the roads. We officially shut at about 7.30am then the online lesson buzz started via Twitter! If you have read a previous blog post you'll know that a few teachers tried this last week - as did I and another teacher at my school.

A fellow teacher -Emma Barker at a neighbouring school was online and already talking about her online lesson using Coveritlive. I had this idea that we could do something together about differences and similarities between the 2 schools. We decided that as the schools are not that far apart, some of the children probably knew each other already.

Then along came more collaboraters! We couldn't have done it without them. Massive thanks to my HT for giving the go ahead, Dughall McCormick for massive help on the Digital Brain - also helping on the DB thanks to Tom White and James Greenwood!

We started off with a primarypad that enabled us to share ideas for online surveys to get the differences and similarities ideas flowing. Primary pad also enables you to share with others and chat. We then created 2 wallwisher walls for then children to post their ideas and questions.



The DB was firing on all cylinders with ideas! Dughall created the joint community, children were added, surveys created, threads in the forums were added by all of us. As we - or someone else had an idea the whole thing grew and grew - now all we needed were children!

We sent out a group text - Emma Barker will guest post on here and tell you how she contacted her class. So far we've had some uptake but not massively - this gets my brain working...

I've recently read a blog - can't remember who but if it's you then get in touch! - about how schools could have something in place for online lessons in weather such as this when many schools are closed. If online lessons are to be truly successful then most of the children in a class need to want to log on and access it. So far we have had a few between us - it's still early days and many may well contribute this evening.

So - how do we get the children to log on for some part of the day to access online lessons?

Here are a few ideas...

• Give online lessons a high priority in class, especially if the weather is forecast to be bad
• Decide on the online, collaborative tools you will use - live or not live
• Teach the children how to use them
• Give them the expectation that there will be an online lesson and how they will be notified as to the time if it is in live real time
• Be enthusiastic and excited, make them want to log on!

My evaluation of today is that what we achieved could not have been achieved without online collaboration. Several varying activities were set up for the children to do that involved learning at their level - collaborative project + work via their year group page on our VLE.

The way forward is to set this in stone so that all KNOW that there will be an expectation to take part in an online lesson should the school be shut due to bad weather.

Emma Barker did a fantastic online lesson using coveritlive which I hope you will enjoy reading about.

There is no reason that this should not become the norm - we the educators just need to embrace the technology and use it!

We first of all discussed what we'd already learnt about how to work well together as a team before I went through the ppt. They did really well and had already talked about all the bullet points on slide 2 as well as saying that the encouraging point was important and that teamwork doesn't work well if people say mean things to each other if they don't agree. We went through the other slides, sorted the class out into teams - I just gave each child a number and a table so a very random selection - I could also have use the HAT software to select.

The themes we chose were, dragons, monsters, patterns, a zoo or a castle. I gave the class 5 minutes to choose one of those themes and select their 2 colours. This was a very interesting 5 minutes, some teams were able to select a theme and colours very quickly - others took longer and had a split decision that needed sorting out....again class teamwork helps to solve this as the teams that had selected easily spoke about how they had decided which helped the others! I gave them 20 minutes to draw their theme and off they went.

As I went around the room it was so interesting watching how differently the teams worked - one team had chosen 'patterns' and they talked about how not everyone wanted to draw a pattern so they had a 'shading in' job. Another team chose a zoo & said that they'd decided on this because everyone could draw an animal with the 2 colours that they had. A different team also chose a zoo and had decided that the people who could draw well should draw the hard parts of the animals and leave easier bits to the others so that their zoo would look good.

After 20 minutes I stopped them and each team spoke in turn about how they thought they were working, any problems they'd had and if/how they had sorted them out as a team - we decided that it was actually going very well! I then gave them another 5 minutes to do as much as they could...we also needed to talk about whether it mattered on this occasion if they had finished their drawing or not (reminding of the objective of the afternoon etc..).

As a plenary each team came out, showed their drawing and talked about their teamwork. I asked each team what they would do better next time & here are a couple of the replies... use the all space on the page so that it was easier for everyone to have their own bit rather than drawing a big castle in the middle, try to work more quickly so their drawing could be more finished, nothing, we worked really well!

So a very worthwhile afternoon building teamwork, this book has many other good ideas that are easily adaptable to different ages - some lend themselves better to older children but a worthwhile buy!

Inspired by others via Twitter this morning - snow day for me, at home planning & tweeting every now and then - I decided to try to set up a 'live online' session for our school. I already had a topic based research lesson in our ICT time that would work online so initially I thought that that would be what I'd do. After chatting to another teacher we decided that it would be better to do a joint project between Y3 & Y5 as an experiment;

• To see if children would log on
• To see if they liked the idea
• To help us learn about how to deliver a live lesson so it could become the norm if we have more snow days..

We decided to 'meet' on the VLE for about an hour - the 2 classes were sent a group text and asked to meet at a certain time online on the VLE. I'd prepared a page that gave them instructions as to what to do and explained the 'big idea.'....which was to use 2 images of snowmen to stimulate descriptive writing in the form of notes to be posted on wallwisher.Our plan was to see if enough descriptions and ideas could be generated in order to use it as a start for planning and writing when we return to school - most likely tomorrow.

We decided to first of all ask the children to write their name on one wallwisher so we knew how many had attended and then choose one of two snowmen to post descriptions about. When the session was live the wallwisher was open, now it's 'not live' we've changed the settings to all posts must be approved...just to be safe and sure!

I was SO excited when children started to log on and post on wallwisher! We've had maybe 15/60 so far (only 2 hours ago at the time of writing this) and I am hoping that as the day goes on more children will log on if they were out enjoying themselves in the snow.We've had about 40 posts on the name wall and about 70 on the description wall so far. We ( myself + another teacher) started to give feedback as children wrote things - can you think of a better word for xyz/can you develop that idea a bit more kind of thing.

I did feel that this was a 'short burst' activity that could have done with another stage - maybe mindmeister or bubbl.us to then start collaborative planning before using another medium for individual writing....I'm thinking PPT or a website such as Class Tools .

I then went back onto Twitter where Pete Richardson had posted this link to what he had done for an online lesson...I loved his lesson - real 'live' teaching online with all sorts of interactive activites for the children. He used Twiddla which I didn't know about - great online tool for live collaboration - to give instructions and feedback as the lesson went along. Twiddla also has a sound option which is both a cool tool and a useful tool to have in an online lesson.

David Mitchell also did an online lesson with such enthusiasm that he inspired me to have a go! Do read his blog account as to what went on!...click here for that.

Next time - bound to be a next time - I'm not sure which medium I would use, I think that depends on the task I wish to set. I will definitely use Twiddla - might do 'live' online homework very soon, I like wallwisher because it's so easy to use, child friendly in that it's great to see the wall growing with posts and I think the VLE came into its own today as a great place to 'meet.'

Thanks to Dughall for his VLE help..to my HT for his help and to Gemma (fellow teacher) for her ideas and help...

What have I learnt?

• Live online learning is exciting for both teacher and class
• It's a learning curve for me to make it better next time
• It's an upcoming thing - lots of interest from lots of people on Twitter as to how all these lessons went..
• I've learnt that Twiddla exists..

So the next time we have snow....look out for more online learning!

Welcome to the New Year!

As many people are doing blogs about what they like, wish for, are going to become better at and are looking forward to I thought I'd do the same! I am most definitely looking forward to going to Bett for the first time and a highlight of this visit will be to meet the Brainpop people and help out on their stand for an hour or so!...I am sure there will be many highlights on this day and hopefully a lot of inspiring ideas that I can take back with me to help my teaching.

I'm also looking forward to going to my first TeachMeet in Doncaster in March, I'm hoping I will be brave enough to have a go and present something....I love the idea of meeting teachers who are very passionate and very good at what they do.... I know this will be both stimulating and developmental for me.

Next I'm going to recommend a friend to you all. Her name is Helen Quayle and she's a professional musician (trumpet) and music educator. In my previous life (professional musician) I worked with her on many, many occasions both in concerts and musical workshops with children of all ages. She's fantastic at creating, organising and delivering musical projects for all ages within any educational setting.

She runs the education part of the work that the Lancashire Sinfonietta do - click here for information about her projects that are up and running very successfully via this orchestra.
She also does the same for the Northern Chamber Orchestra and is an integral part of the education team at Manchester Camerata. She can also be contacted individually via her mobile - 07737 327 471.

Since I joined Twitter in August 2009 it has provided me with huge amount of learning. I follow many brilliant & inspirational people, read their tweets and their blogs which has given me both help and ideas to improve my teaching with Web 2.0 tools in particular. I would never have known about or thought about using a Wii in class without Twitter. I have used GBL before but after reading what others do I shall use it more widely - always with the comment 'teaching tool' being uppermost in my mind.

I shall mention a few of the people I find inspiring - if I don't mention you then I am sorry but I know that you've inspired me!

• Mark Warner and his wonderful Ideas to Inspire
• Tom Barrett and his blog - always makes me evaluate, think and go 'wow!'
• Bev Evans - her resources site and her blog - wonderfully inspiring ICT ideas!
• Peter Richardson and his blog - he's on a similar path re ICT as me & it's great to share ideas
• Read Write Talk because it's sooo creative and a bit whacky with things that just grab my mind

I decided to stick at 5 bullet points but the list could just go on and on, Dawn Hallybone , Simon Haughton , Simon Widdowson , Simon Finch to name a few others.

Thanks to Dughall McCormick for helping me with the Wii in Y3 and I look forward to his further help and involvement with this.

I also find Rachel Orr to be a source of inspiration, she posts on a different forum and regularly writes comments such as the one below which always make me evaluate my own practice - do I do this?

Whenever I give feedback to NQTs and teachers early on in their career (plus those who are established and struggling) I always ask them to think about:-

1. What is it I want the children to be able to....do, know, use, apply etc... by the end of the lesson.

2. What I am going to teach them in order to help them learn this

3. What task/activity/vehicle will enable this successfully, be differentiated and and still provide appropriate challenge

Whenever a new concept is being learned it is our job to provide the appropriate scaffolding to enable a child to learn and if this means providing a simple WALT - this is what we are learning ..... and the success criteria - this is what you have to do, use, know, include to be successful....this is teaching and learning.

Providing process criteria is great in maths - particularly if the teacher extracts this from the children before they set about using and applying it.

Some children will need to be given the process criteria - the steps they need to include to be successful - this is differentiating the success criteria.

If you are assessing formatively you may ask the children to provide the success criteria for a given WALT.

If this is summative assessment you may remind the children to think about what they will need to include etc... to be successful.

Teaching and learning - this is the core business of any school - not testing whether a child has got it or not.

I observe many lessons where WALT and Success criteria are used and also Must/Should/Could are used - what I see being missed frequently are opportunities to challenge and aim high - this is often because the teacher thinks they have differentiated and provided a challenge task but miss the immediate opportunity of TEACHING challenge.

Again, when giving feedback, I ask the teacher to think about their focus group. What is it the focus group will learn because of your input? If they can do the task without your input why are you there?

I am also lucky to work in a school with fantastic staff who support, help and inspire in my daily teaching life in so many different ways...

2010 - can't wait! :-)