Telling somebody how you feel might take more than words for some children. Inspired by the traditional early years ‘All About Me’ templates for starting school, I’ve made this Pages journal for children to share their experiences of home with their teacher when they return to school. This can be done before the children start school or during their first days in class.

There are 4 activities and children use photography, video, drawing and sound to express their emotions when reflecting on their time learning at home.

This is what the journal looks like:

Download the Pages journal here.

Learn how to create your own Raindrop Comic of photography, drawing and audio in this simple book for parents and teachers.

Download RAINDROP for free on Apple Books here.

Our youngest learners are using all kinds of online learning tools but what do they understand about password safety? MONKEYCOW is the perfect storybook to teach password safety this year. This blog posts contains an exclusive story video to use at home during the month of Safer Internet Day and free resources to send home too.

The National Cyber Security Centre recommends to ‘Think Random’ when setting passwords. Choosing three random words that are memorable, but not personal to you, makes it easy to remember but also difficult to guess your password.

A good way to create a strong and memorable password is to use three random words. Numbers and symbols can still be used if needed, for example 3redhousemonkeys27!

Be creative and use words memorable to you, so that people can’t guess your password. Your social media accounts can give away vital clues about yourself so don’t use words such as your child’s name or favourite sports team which are easy for people to guess.

National Cyber Security Centre, Think Random

But how might you teach password security to children? It sounds like a really dry lesson for any learners let alone young children!

Writing about home learning from an early years perspective doesn’t feel too out of the ordinary as parent partnerships play a key role in early childhood development.

“Children learn and develop well in enabling environments, in which their experiences respond to their individual needs and there is a strong partnership between practitioners and parents and carers.”

Development Matters, 2012

In Development Matters, the enabling environments principle promises that early years practitioners build relationships with the families of the children they educate. The document goes on to say that formative assessment in the early years is most effective when it includes observations, interactions and information from parents:

“Observe children as they act and interact in their play, everyday activities and planned activities, and learn from parents about what the child does at home“.

Therefore, extending learning to the home from an early years setting should be more like a tweak to what we already have in place for parent partnerships.

This post is about my favourite lesson from the free ‘Get Started With Code’ teacher guide by Apple. I love Lesson 5 because the progression in language, understanding, teamwork and sequencing is always great. In this free teacher guide, every lesson has a practical activity which teachers a computational thinking skill to solve a problem in ‘real life’.

This means you can teach coding without needing a computer!

The lessons do progress on to a free coding app called ‘CodeSpark’ where young learners use arrows (like on a Bee-Bot) to make characters move on screen. But the first part of each lesson plan is effective because it teaches the language and thinking of computing in a practical, off-screen activity. Children understand the concept in a real-life experience before applying it to on-screen coding. It also helps you to teach children how to problem solve and impacts on the Characteristics of Effective Learning by helping them to think critically and change the way they are approaching the task.

Download the free ‘Get Started With Code’ teacher guide here.

The practical activity in this lesson is called ‘Robot Fun’ and uses a squared floor grid with direction cards of forwards, backwards, left and right. You help children to ‘break the problem down’ and solve in it in manageable chunks. This a computational thinking skill called ‘decomposition’. It also helps children to understand what the commands of forwards, backwards, left and right mean in a real life, before applying this to a Bee-Bot or the CodeSpark app (OR BOTH!)

I introduced my class of 4 & 5 year olds to green screen filming this week and even though it felt like a technical process to learn, the ease of the software and the creative process gave the children opportunities to demonstrate their critical thinking and problem solving skills.

I began by setting up an area of the classroom for the filming to take place and I wanted this space to give immediate visual feedback to the children throughout their filming process. I included a TV screen with AirPlay, a small green box to act as the stage, an iPad with DoInk’s Green Screen app installed and some PJ Mask characters.