Flags & Emojis

So, last month I saw the below Facebook post from a friend.

It got me thinking; do the children know the answers?

So, here's what we did:

- I gave them tablets (iPad);

- Got them to open a document and, from the Emoji keyboard, insert a flag that contained a Union Flag.

- Next, find out where the flag is the flag of, why it contains a Union Flag and some of the history of the country*. They used the internet, books and each other for help.

-> Of course, this could be used for any flag in the Emoji keyboard, "Whose is it?" "Why that 'pattern'?" "Why those colours?" and so on... 

Here's some of that they produced:

*Not all of them are countries!

Emoji Autobiographies

Getting to know your class at the start of the year can take many forms. Both of us are now part of job shares where we only teach for part of the week. Here's something that one of our classes did with one of our inventive colleagues...

Half the battle of getting children to write is engaging them. As we've written about before, the emoji keyboard can create engagement in writing. This task was for the children to write about themselves and insert emojis for some of the nouns in their sentences.

Word Classes (Parts of Speech) & Emoji

At the start of December, I shared a lesson I'd carried out with my class utilising the Emoji Keyboard on iPad devices. I've recently done something very similar, but this time with the focus being on word classes (parts of speech).

The emoji symbols give the children a prompt for what they could include in the sentence and next to the emoji is an indication of how that emoji is linked to a word class. In the main, the sentences created were correct. Where errors occurred (adjective / adverb confusion or the wrong noun being used as the subject), it provided the opportunity to address misconceptions. Once children had used my prompts, they were then able to create their own. They had to follow the same process though: create the prompt first and then write the sentences. 

It was interesting to see how children could take the same prompt and create so many different sentences from it.

Emojis & Homophones

"Why do they keep using the wrong 'their', why?" That was me on Thursday evening. Marking some writing and in the 50/50 choice between 'their' and 'there' (if a child was simply guessing), it had been used incorrectly far too many times. Result? Need to do something about it...

While planning this week, I happened to have a spare English lesson to do something with and had booked the iPad devices 'to do something English based'. Somehow, the idea of using emojis to practise, teach and show understanding of homophones came to me. In the past, my use of emojis in English lessons have been based upon Lee Parkinson's ideas, so some credit must be given to him and his books. 

On an iPad device, in Pages, I set up a document with some emojis as prompts for sentences. I then uploaded this to my class GAfE Google Drive for the children to download onto their iPad devices and use to complete the task. 

The children needed to write sentences using my prompts, before they were the allowed to generate some prompts of their own. Some of their work can be seen here. 

The emoji keyboard can easily be turned on for iOS, it's also available on OSX. I believe it would also work on a Chromebook and other tablets. I'm unsure of its availability on Windows. 

This lesson engaged and enthused the class to work on and think about their homophone choices. It did not make them homophone experts - there's still some work to do with that...
 

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