Gifts / Cards - Word Clouds

Bit late for this year UK teachers - sorry. But, you can start planning for next year...

For two and a half terms this year just gone we actually taught the same class. Mates, assistant heads, bloggers and job share teachers. Think we drove each other a little crazy at times. Anyway, come the end of the year we were thinking of a gift for the pupils in our class and this is what we came up with: 

Again this year, we undertook the summing up of each day in three words. At the end of the year we therefore had 190 X 3 words. We stuck these words into a word cloud generator, purchased some picture frames and hey presto, they look rather good. They certainly look like they cost more than 80p each to make! And, they're full of the children's thoughts, word choices and experience whilst in our class.

I hope that most of them will keep it and look back upon it fondly. And, as for 'english', we decided it looked good as a design choice - but it bugs me the more I look at it! There's the off typo/spelling error too... However, look which word came out top!

We'll three word blog again next year and may even use word clouds on Christmas, Mother's/Father's Day (and so on) cards too.

Word clouds from some previous years too.

How it Feels to be 40

Saw this Tweet,

#recap Observations from children on how it feels to be 40 https://t.co/xIJXMvrS4n pic.twitter.com/zETxxnWeNe

— The Poke (@ThePoke) May 20, 2017

Asked some Year Five children for their responses...

This sort of question gives an insight into their thinking and raises interesting talking points. I'll be doing it more often.

The Story Behind the Tweet

Not all our ideas are our own. Here's another we found on Twitter:

@alanpeat @waitrose real story, but so many ways you could use this #constrainedwriting pic.twitter.com/OItoy8Z0Xn

— nina (@ninalouise213) 30 May 2016

Nina posted the above Tweet and we immediately loved the idea. It's taken a few weeks to find the opportunity to try it out, but now we have and it worked quite well. It certainly engaged a group of Year Fives who just about know how Twitter works and certainly hear about and see Tweets in various media they see.

Here's what we did:

Firstly, I considered looking for an intriguing Tweet (which I may do in the future), but I didn't and instead created my own, fictional Tweet, using lemmetweetthatforyou:

I read the class the original example from Waitrose in Nina's Tweet and then showed them the fictional Tweet. I informed them that it was fictional and I even went to the bother of checking that the @Mentions don't currently exist on the site. 

Challenge 1: explain what the Tweet's about. Challenge 2: write in a similar style to Waitrose. Challenge 3: explain it in exactly 140 words. 

We completed our writing in the Count Words & Characters app and then posted the finished stories to a Padlet wall. 

We've written in the past about other forms of restrained writing: Two Sentence Stories, Stories in a Tweet, 100WC and others...

'We Make Use of...' Night Zookeeper

Again, something we've know about for sometime, but took a while to get around to using. Over the past five years, we've shared the work of Night Zookeeper many times and often spoken to and shared ideas with 'Night Zookeeper Paul'. Since September 2015, we've been using the Night Zookeeper website with our classes.

Free Elements

First of all, it is possible to use the Night Zookeeper website for free. Something Night Zookeeper state is that they are a 'Social Enterprise' and will always offer 'free elements' of their site. This allows all children, in all schools, from all walks of life to access and benefit from what they offer. For us, this sums up the company and the employees (many of whom are co-founders and company directors). They're just a nice bunch! Take a look at 'Free Resources', every class gets a Class Blog (ours: http://tinyurl.com/pqmc7lo & http://tinyurl.com/ouo84vx) and Star Writing. 

Image credit: twitter.com/nightzookeeper

Subscribing

We just said it can be used for free. Why subscribe? We thoroughly recommend a subscription. Through this, a teacher can set their own 'Teacher Missions'. This is where the class complete a task that their teacher chosen the objectives for, work bank and more. In addition, Children can complete their own missions, change their avatar, create animals and more. As a teacher, the writing can be assessed against the criteria set. In the time we've used the site (seven months), there have been many, many useful upgrades and there are more in the pipe line. What we've written here is only a taster of the site. When signing up, full access is initially given for free, so sign up and try it to see how you get on with it.

What We've Done

We've used it to complete the 100 Word Challenge on a weekly basis. In addition, we've also completed the Star Writing Challenge. We've read other children's work on commented upon what they've written. We've received comments ourselves. A small number of safeguarding issues have cropped up (sharing information), but when they have (in this safe environment), it's been a good opportunity to learn for the children involved. We took part in World Creative Writing Month 16, finishing 19th and writing over 94,000 words in about 20 days. The children enjoyed using the site, have written lots and been enthused by it. It has been a positive addition to our classrooms. Most of our writing has been in addition to our English curriculum and some has been part of our English work. Many children have chosen to use it at home and during break times in school.

'We Make Use of...' 100WC

We've been aware of the 100 Word Challenge since 2011. In the past, we've used the prompt occasionally in class and commented upon children's writing shared via the 100 Word site. And, in 2012, Julia, the creator of the challenge, even attended a TeachMeet that we organised. 

This year, through the Night Zookeeper website, we've started to use the 100 Word Challenge on a weekly basis. We've made time each week to complete the challenge and to comment upon other children's work. We've seen it be hugely beneficial to the children and had an impact on many of their writing abilities. Generally, in our English lessons, the children need to demonstrate their ability to follow a certain text type in a certain way (there are success criteria and learning objectives to meet). The 100 Word Challenge is different: write a response to the prompt in your own way, how you like... 

Some children have written entries as good as their normal every-day writing; others have been really enthused by it and created writing better than they do at other times. Once the children have completed their 100 Word entry, they visit other class' entries and read the children's work. After they've read it, they leave comments for that child. Thus, widening their experience of writing and being critical of their peers. 

Image credit: https://100wc.net

All-in-all, it's been a wonderful addition to our classroom practice. As we use Night Zookeeper, we've also made use of the Star Writing each week. Although the 100WC can be carried out through the Night Zookeeper website, any blog site can be used and Julia has recently started offering blogs hosted on 100wc.net (Contact her for details).

Should you wish to pop by and read our writing or leave us a comment or two, our Night Zookeeper writing can be found http://tinyurl.com/pqmc7lo & http://tinyurl.com/ouo84vx.

TeachMeetARU - Maintaining a Professional Blog

On 27th January 2016, we attended TeachMeetARU in Cambridge. Liam wrote a reflection of attending the event here. As part of the TeachMeet, Dan carried out a two minute presentation.

The message was along the lines of what we previously said in this blog post.

Our First Book: 'The Best of Primary Ideas 2011-2015'

Four years ago today, Liam and Dan met to set up this blog and the Twitter account attached to it. The aim: to share what we were doing in our classrooms with the wider world. Since that time, it's grown and grown. It now covers various social media sites and generates thousands of visitors per month. We're pleased it's been so useful to all those who have looked at what we share. We are full-time class teachers sharing our ideas as and when we can. As a bit of a summary of the past four years, we've published our first ePub, 'The Best of Primary Ideas 2011-2015'.

Take a look at the introduction to the book: "This book includes information that has previously been made available on our blog. The blog inspired after we both started using the internet to seek suggestions and ideas for our classrooms. Between them, Liam and Dan have over 24 years teaching experience. At the time of publishing this book, we've posted 140 blog posts. We hope this book will be the first of a number of books we have planned. If you have a colleague currently not reading blogs or teacher blogs are new to you, this book could provide a good introduction to what's on a teacher's blog." If you think it'll be useful, download a copy. In the future, we hope to publish some more of our thoughts and ideas in book format. 

Download from the iTunes Store or as a PDF file. 

Live Blog with Padlet

As part of our computing lessons this year, we wanted to be able to live blog some events in our classrooms. We currently do not have class blogs and were wondering how our goal of Live Blogging could be met. 

We decided Padlet would be a good platform, that the children are familiar with, to give Live Blogging a go. 

So, we set up a Padlet page. We stuck a large QR Code linking to the page on the wall of the classroom. First thing in the morning, we handed the first child in the register an iPad device and gave them an instruction of, "Scan that code and in the next twenty minutes, write about what you do. After that, pass on the iPad device to the next person in the register."

It worked very well. Using one Padlet wall allowed the day's event to all be in one place. The children's familiarity with QR Codes, iPad devices and Padlet allowed them to blog unaided. The results were good and we even got some comments from those who came across our Live Blog. The posts to the page were moderated by the class teacher.

Here's Year Five's day from 18/05/15:

Created with Padlet

One class, who came across our Live Blog, also chose to carry out their own a few days later and that can be seen here. 

If you give it a go, we'd love to see the outcome. 

Follow our live blog http://t.co/shcRColVeL thanks @ThisIsLiamM for the idea.

— Robin Smith (@RAS1975) May 20, 2015

#Comments4Kids Without a Blog

On Twitter, the Hashtag #comments4kids is used to share blog posts written by children so that others may find them and leave the child a comment. The comments give the blog post purpose, the children an audience and help to encourage children's writing.

In our blog post about Blog Books we offered a way for classes who wanted to blog, but for whatever reason were currently unable to, a way to start their blogging journey. This is another step that could be taken.

If children produce work and it's place online, but not in a blog, a Google Form could be set up to allow people who view the work to leave a comment. An example of this can be found here. Through the above link and QR Code, our children received some nice comments that, if needed can be moderated, from 'strangers' who kindly read and commented upon their work.

Again, as we said in that previous post about blogging, if you ant advice about blogging? We'd suggest contacting David Mitchell.

Blog Books

Want to blog? Heard about how other schools are succeeding with it and making strides forward with writing progress? But, you can't blog...

Maybe it's the school that's in the way, technology not allowing it, you're not convinced...

Here's an idea I've had: 'Blog Books'.

Ideally, the children would be blogging online, building up an audience and receiving comments / feedback. If that's not possible, you may like to try this:

- Grab a pile of books that are not being used.

- Stick a class list in the front cover of each one.

- Give the class a writing task. 100 Word Challenge or 5 Sentence Challenge would be a good start. Maybe a recount or just as the children to, 'write something'.

- The children write.

- Now, the teacher marks nothing. The children give their book to someone else, who leaves comments and feedback. They also tick their name off on the class list in the front of the book. Each 'Blog Book' session, the feedback and commenting needs to be done by a different peer.

Children will be carrying out many of the skills associated with blogging. After a few weeks or months, there'll be evidence of children 'blogging' and commenting, and maybe, just maybe this may lead onto blogging on an online blog...

Want advice about blogging? We'd suggest contacting David Mitchell.

Not all Displays are for Children (Part 2)

The Part 1 of this blog post came almost two years ago now. In December, we finally got around to putting something in place we'd been meaning to 'get around to' for a while. We wanted to place a display on the outside of our classroom for, other classes, parents, grandparents and general passers by to see (and interact with). We posted the picture below to our Twitter account.

The picture and idea was well received so we have decided to write about it in more than 140 characters.

The purpose of the display? Advertise what the class have been doing. Generate website / blog traffic. Show off a bit.

The first thing added was a word cloud. Each member of the class was asked for a sentence to describe their year so far. They only wrote positives. :-)

Next, some QR codes were added. These link to the class website (containing examples of work, recounts of events and photographs) as well as Padlet walls and other examples of children's online work. The QR Code provides a quick link for anyone with a mobile device and should the QR Code not work for any reason, each has a TinyURL below as a back up or alternative.

Our most recent addition is some augmented reality. Using Aurasma, we created a link to a slideshow of photos from a recent school trip. This is probably the 'show off bit'. 

When parents and other family members come into the classroom they look at displays, ask to see children's work and enjoy seeing what's being done. Now they can do it from outside and (if QR Codes are used) realise they can also do this from home.

We've since presented about this as part of a TeachMeet.

Why Bother?

Why bother? Why bother to blog, to Tweet, to Pin?

We are teachers, we enjoy seeing others learn, daily. It's what we do, it's what we enjoy. So, helping others to learn, people doing the same job, is just as rewarding. Hearing back from others about the ideas we've shared here and how they've been used is rewarding. It reaffirms the belief that we're doing the right thing. We share a Google Doc and visitors come - awesome. We post a Tweet and one person, just one, ReTweets it - excellent. Someone comments on a blog post, "Really like this" - fantastic. 

We're busy; books to mark, lessons to plan, clubs to run, meetings to attend, whilst also seeing family, friends and generally living.

We don't earn money from this.

We share ideas here. We read blog posts elsewhere. We're allowing others to learn from us, just like we're befitting from the blogs written by others. If we do something outstanding* in our classroom and tell no one, 30 children benefit. If we write about it here, there's the possibility that the whole world could benefit. That's an amazing thought.

At the time of writing, just under 100,000 visits to this blog have been registered in its first 26 months of existence. We have hundreds of Pins on Pinterest, Likes on Facebook and Circles on Google+. Videos on YouTube.

So, should you join Twitter? Yes. Use Facebook professionally? If you want. Look at Pinterest? At least take a look. Start a blog? It's daunting, read some others, give it a go.

As already said:

We are teachers, we enjoy seeing others learn, daily. It's what we do, it's what we enjoy. So, helping others to learn, people doing the same job, is just as rewarding.

*Technical vocabulary for 'good' or 'engaging'.

Three Worders

After previously using this idea at the end of a lesson I have now started using it at the end of each day.

Image credit: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p2dfq

On Simon Mayo’s BBC Radio2 Drivetime show he asks listeners to sum up their day in three words and send them in for him to read out. I decided this would be a good way to sum up each day in our classroom. So, I purchased an academic diary and each day I pick a child to sum up their day in three words. The three word recounts can also be found here.

If Twitter is micro blogging I’m not sure what this is! The children enjoy it. It’s another way of making them think about their writing and at the end of the year it’ll be nice to look back over as a record of our year.

So go on, get your class into ‘Three Worders’. Text or Tweet them to Simon and he might even read one out!