Bitmoji to Personalise Homophones

Yeah, yeah, we know! It's 2021 and Bitmojis for teachers appear to be everywhere! We quite like the little cartoon version of ourself that we can use to add to our lesson resources, particularly at this time of remote learning. We have seen this you're/your use of Bitmoji several times and have made our own. We've also begun looking at which other homophones and near homophones could be explained using a bit of Bitmoji. 

There are some examples below. 

We've placed our editable PowerPoint original here too if it's useful to anyone. 

Of course, we'd love to hear ideas for adding to our collection. 

If you want to make these your own, download the editable PowerPoint, the relevant Bitmoji images of yourself and edit the PowerPoint. 

 

Bridge Behaviours

In September, we used this video with our Year Six class to discuss the behaviours of the characters and relate them to class. How could this have been better resolved? Does any character come out of it well? What can we learn from them?

https://vimeo.com/27299211  

Bridge from Ting on Vimeo.

Connect 4 with Multiples

Earlier this year, we came across a blog post by Joe Schwartz entitled, 'I Like This Game Because You Have to Think Hard.'

In his blog post, he gave students a blank 100/120 grid for them to fill in trying to get 4 in a row. We saw the benefits of this activity, but currently working in Upper Key Stage Two, our pupils are pretty proficient with numbers between 0 and 100. So, we adapted the idea to make it about times table facts. 

1. Give the children a blank 12 x 12 grid of squares between two.

2. Ensure each child has a different coloured pen/pencil.

3. Children fill in facts on the grid, taking it in turns and trying to get four in a row horizontally or vertically. 

4. Depending on competence, children could have a times table grid on hand to enable them to check each others facts.

Enjoy!

'How To' Diagrams and Dual Coding

As we've previously written, we are trying to implement some of what we learned when reading about Dual Coding. 

Here are some of the posters/guides we've made and used in our Year Six classroom as visual guides for our children to use to support/scaffold their learning.

Days in Months of the Year (editable copy)

Long Division (editable copy)

Mixed Number & Improper Fraction Conversions (editable copy)

Co-ordinates (editable copy)

Ascending/Descending (pdf copy)

They've worked for us. They may be useful to you. See links for editable copies. 

Pupil Stationery Toolkits

At the start of this school year, there was much discussion on social media and forums about methods of providing pupils with their own individual resources (for COVID19 reasons). 

A little later than we hoped to publish this post (we've been a little busy!), but we hope it's useful to someone...

So, here's what we do at our school, how long we've been doing it and why.

Back in 2017, we visited Woodside Primary Academy. As part of our visit, we picked up a number of best practice ideas. One of which was introducing Toolkits. There are a number of reasons we took these on:

- making children accountable for looking after the stationary the school has paid for

- giving them somewhere to store the equipment

- if they move in the classroom or go to work elsewhere, they just pick up the Toolkit and off they go

- we use everything in there quite regularly.

So, what's in there?

- whiteboard & whiteboard pen

- handwriting pen, green biro & HB pencil

- ruler, protractor and scissors

- sky, grass, mud letters and punctuation

- times table grid / 150 'square'

- A B C D voting card

- red, orange, green discs

- spelling cards for high frequency words

- sentence and vocabulary booklet

- grammar knowledge organiser

And, as you may be able to see, each Toolkit and each item in it is numbered according to the child's register number. When found, lost items can be returned to pupils. 

Me, Me, Me

There are wide and ranging ways to 'get to know your new class'. This year, 2020, we wanted to find out about how the children had been since March, were feeling now, what home is like and added in a couple of 'silly' questions too. 

If it's useful, download a copy here.

The Five Uses of a Comma & Dual Coding

 Well, hello again! Our first post since February - it's been an interesting time (COVID19)!

Over August, we've been doing some reading.

Most recently, we have read 'Dual Coding With Teachers' and have used some of what we learned from that reading to adapt a resource we made earlier in 2020.

At a PiXL Event towards the end of 2019, we came across the revelation that 'commas have five uses in written English'.

So, combining both the information from PiXL and Oliver Caviglioli, we created this:

We're going to give it a go in our Year Six classrooms this coming year. We hope it'll improve the accuracy with which our children use commas when writing. 

Firstly, they need to know the 'five uses' and then link them to the images.

Next, we hope the codes can then be used to jog memories and used as teaching points.

We would be the last to claim to be English specialists, so if you have any feedback on our understanding of this element of English, please let us know.

An up-to-date copy of this resource, if it is changed, will always be here. (Typo corrected).