Take a look at Crickweb which has some super resources for using with the interactive whiteboard. It is website of the month on the Promethean Planet website. I also must recommend poissonrouge again which the children love. I really like it too as they are continually adding and refing games and activities.
This week I mastered the art of creating activote questions. It is fairly time consuming to make them but once they are there they are there. The set of 10 I made are all linked to money within £1 and the children were incredibly motivated. They enjoy finding out who answered what as much as answering the questions and the cheer that went up when 100% was achieved, nearly took the roof off.
We did some wrong answer analysis and the children were soon identifying why certain wrong answers had been given…..”ah they just counted in 10’s and didn’t notice the 20p”
All this reinforces about learning from our mistakes. We invited our headteacher in to see us using the pods yesterday, and true to form we had a technical hitch - the board and the pen would not react. Thinking on my feet as one often has to do with technology I asked the children what they thought we should do? “Shut it down and then start it all up again.” came the reply. Thank goodness for 6 year olds….it worked.
We have also been doing some work on Jack and the Beanstalk. The board has some images in the Literacy area of the resource library for the story. On showing it to the children they expressed an interest in making their own flipcharts to tell the story, so guess what we will be doing next week. I just love it when these things happen.
Yesterday we took out the pods again as I had managed to get some more flip charts to use. Marlyn and I had had a Skype chat and she sent me some of her charts. I also found out that I could simply put up a question and the children could vote ‘ad hoc’.
We re-registered the pods as some had not worked properly. The children are so excited and motivated when using them. When the Speech therapist came in she was totally gobsmacked by the pods and stayed for a demonstration.
During the holidays I will be looking for and making up more activote flipcharts - and finishing off the Level 1 tutorial.
Marlyn put me on to this one. FreeText is produced by Kudlian software and is a super word processing programme suitable to use with a widw range of ages and stages. My P2’s have begun to use it and I love the ease with which you can introduce aspects of word processing. Putting a photo in using a Mac is a breeze, similar to ComicLife it just opens up your iPhoto library and hey presto, grab your picture across.
At just £29.95 for 5 licences and Macs no longer shipping with Appleworks or iWorks, it is a good investment. A 21 day free trial is available to download which is what I am using at the moment - why not give it a whirl.
Next session we are introducing the Oxford Reading Tree to Dunoon Primary. I have been busy ordering and counting and trying to get best value for our money. The latest catalogue contains a new resource called MagicPage which looks like a great addition to ORT.
