Author: @MarcWithersey

Early Years and Online Safety: my top resources!

@MarcWithersey Apps, Blogs, Collaboration, Computing, e-Safety, Early Years, Reading, Understanding the World , , , , , ,

Digital Citizenship and online safety is such an important part of the National Curriculum and confidence to teach this subject is growing amongst teachers in upper primary years. But what is happening lower down school?

In the early years we have always been good at providing children with opportunities to develop relationship skills and problem solve in their peer groups. We have access to many age appropriate resources to discuss stranger danger and bullying. Over the last year I’ve started to see good materials published to bring online safety in to our curriculum. I want to share some of these today.

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Puppet Pals is still a staple app for Early Years!

@MarcWithersey Apps, Collaboration, Early Years, iPads, Reading, Technology , , , , , , , , ,

Puppet-Pals-HD-Directors-p-Pass1Puppet Pals, a story-telling app created by two dads, has been around from the very beginning. The set of first generation iPads arrived in my classroom and it was the first app I downloaded that I thought ‘Yes, this is it!’ It was the app I used when Nottinghamshire County Council’s ICT specialist visited to see me teach with iPads and it changed her view on their potential for learning.

Download Puppet Pals from the App Store here.

That was 2010. Fast forward 6 years and Puppet Pals is probably one of the few apps that’s remained the same and remained strong.

Let’s take a look at how Puppet Pals has been used in my classes over the years.

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My Lessons From Major Tim Peake

@MarcWithersey Blogs, Collaboration, Leadership and Managemant, Reading, Science, Social Media, Understanding the World , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday 17th June

This is the day my class waited for! Our hero Major Tim Peake spent his last day on the International Space Station and preparations began for his journey home.

It has been such a buzz following this mission. Since the launch, children in my class have been fascinated and asked so many questions about space. From the launch through to today they have followed this mission and been inspired by this journey. As I look back to December 15th when I heard about the launch on the news on my drive to work I was excited! I could not wait to talk about this with my class and watch the footage on our Smart TV. Back then though, I would never have guessed how involved we would become in space exploration!

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TeachMeet Midlands: 7th July 2016

@MarcWithersey Collaboration, early years, Leadership and Managemant , , , , ,

TeachMeet Midlands

Reserve Your Tickets Here.

 Learn something new, be amazed, amused and enthused. This is an informal gathering of those curious about teaching and learning. Anyone can share great ideas they’ve trialled in their classrooms, ask important questions or simply sign up to take part in learning conversations. Education professionals from all sectors are welcome to take part.

The main part of TeachMeet is hearing stories about learning, from teachers. This is not an event to present about a product or theory – this is a chance for teachers from all types of establishments to hear ideas from each other. Real narratives of practice that make a difference. It is about being engaged and inspired by our immediate colleagues and a whole bucket load of networking to boot!

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Physical and Digital Masks

@MarcWithersey Apps, Design, Early Years, iPads, Technology , , , , , , ,

What’s the best way to get Tim Peake to sing our song to us?

If you haven’t read the blog post about our Podcast to Tim Peake, take a look at that here. The class are so eager to have Tim Peake listen to their ‘Stars and The Moon’ song and are waiting with so much anticipation to hear back from the European Space Agency. So in the meantime I decided to have some fun with Tim Peake masks and find the best way to have Tim Peake sing ‘Stars and The Moon’.

We love making role play masks but this mask’s purpose is to make it seem like Tim is singing our song to us. It needs to be the most convincing mask!

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Podcasting in Early Years: Singing with Major Tim Peake!

@MarcWithersey Apps, Collaboration, iPads, Social Media, Technology, Understanding the World , , , , , , , ,

AudioBoom.

I had forgotten about this little gem of an app but this week my class wanted to write a song for Tim Peake and tweet it to him. They’ve been fascinated by his story so far and we keep checking his Twitter feed and watching YouTube videos about the International Space Station. Singing him a song is a great compromise as they did ask to FaceTime him when he first arrived on the ISS. Now I can usually make a FaceTime link for them but that is very ambitious!

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Long Term! Teaching Book Creator Skills in Foundation 2

@MarcWithersey Apps, Assessment, Leadership and Managemant , , , , , ,
Last month I had an e-mail from a friend of the Apple Regional Training Centre in Nottingham. She had attended the ‘Enabling Environments’ course we hosted and here I demonstrated Maths Journals. Whenever I share Maths Journals it always amazes early years staff that the children in my class author them independently.  If you haven’t seen Maths Journals yet, check out this post.
It is true!
But the truth is… it takes time.
Developing ICT skills follow a similar pattern as developing writing, phonic or number skills. It is like a dripping tap. Little and often goes a long way and eventually the cup fills up.

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The Language of Maths

@MarcWithersey iPads, Maths, Technology , , , , , , ,

Last year I introduced Maths Journals in my classroom after seeing the success of them on Kristi’s blog. Maths Journals have become the most effective way of capturing the language the children use in maths and a great way for them to show what they know.

Book Creator.

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This year I have used Book Creator for our Maths Journals. Book Creator does exactly that. It creates books on iPads. When we think about book creating we always jump in to English and making multi-modal texts. So to use Book Creator to journal in Maths is a great way to use the app in a different context! Download Book Creator from the AppStore here.

Journals.

Children create their own Maths Journal book on an iPad in Book Creator. They make the front cover of their book a photograph of them and write their name with the pen tool. This means that they can easily find their book from the scrolling menu when they next open Book Creator on that iPad. The books do not sync across all of the iPads so they need to use the same iPad every time they journal.

Children journal once a week in their independent maths time when we have the iPads in the classroom. This is during our maths focus time in the week. Children have their maths input, a maths activity planned for them by an adult and adults observe them with a maths focus too.

When I introduce Maths Journals in January, it is to around 16 children who are showing good skills in using Book Creator already. Other children more time to learn the Book Creator skills necessary to independently journal so they will use Pic Collage in other adult led activities to help develop these skills. They will journal later in the year when these skills are secure.

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Shape Hunts with Pic Collage

@MarcWithersey Apps, Assessment, Child Initiated Learning, Early Years, iPads, Technology , , , ,

Last year I used Padlet as a collaborative tool for shape hunts around school. It was really effective to use a collaborative tool and create a shared document that displayed all of the 3D Shapes we found around school. You can read about that here.

This year Padlet released a free app for iPad making this resource much more stable on iOS, but it requires the latest iOS and we are using iPad 2 which I don’t want to update to iOS 9. So I had to rethink how I can make use of technology to enhance the traditional shape hunt.

“This adult led activity happens in so many foundation classes, and I have led shape walks many times. During these walks, we carry a bag of plastic shapes and we match the plastic pieces to real objects. This happens for 2D and 3D shapes. The children might even mark off on a clipboard the shapes they spotted, like bingo, or draw pictures of the shapes they have seen. By the end of the walk, they have all recorded the same shapes in the same places. I wanted to enhance this experience, to make it more personalised”

So this year we used the free app PicCollage. It makes use of children’s photography skills which they are all secure with when using iPad but creates a very simple and effective poster showing the shapes they noticed around school. They also like it because they get to take a selfie instead of writing their name!

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Spread The Happiness

@MarcWithersey Collaboration, Leadership and Managemant , , , , , ,

Every so often I write about the other areas of my classroom environment and best practices. It’s not all about tech for me, but the rest of my early years provision is the best practise that others share so well online. Sharing my ideas with technology is what I feel I can offer to others as something different, in return for their inspirational blog posts and photo tweets.

The last couple of weeks have been really exciting as I have been working closely with Shonette Bason-Wood of ‘Spread the Happiness‘. Even though we have shared online for a long time, inviting her to keynote at my spring TeachMeet is when we really got to know one another.

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