Start Unplugged! Coding in Early Years.

This Spring Term I was invited to work with staff at Heymann School, Nottinghamshire, who were preparing for Science Technology project. My role was to share and support in ways their early years pupils could engage with coding and control skills.

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I champion a place for unplugged computing in the curriculum as it secures language, vocabulary, children’s internal decision making, recording and visualising their own inner-computing.

To read more about computational thinking, coding and how it supports you to plan for The Characteristics of Effective Learning and thinking skills, you can also read this more recent post of mine. 

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Coding Curriculum Began Today. Am I Prepared? Maybe but let’s have a good sing along anyway!

Today, as I made my final preparations for starting the new school year, I couldn’t ignore the social media coverage of the new computing curriculum. The BBC have written a lot about the new primary curriculum today, from the computing perspective. They also announced a whole host of new projects to promote computer science in their children’s entertainment offerings and in their supporting educational websites.

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Including Early Years and ELGs in a computing curriculum (UPDATED September 2014)

The autumn term has been a long but rewarding one for me. A new job has been the challenge that I was looking for and I am settled in to a new school and a new role. Each week has passed with a new set of achievements and the role has been fast paced, but progress is being made at an astonishing rate!

One focus for me, as for many of us, is implementing a new computing curriculum for the school. As an early years teacher I am keen to include the foundation stage within the primary curriculum planning phase and make stronger links between the two curriculums.

This may be an easier process for other curriculum areas, but within the ‘technology’ strand in Early Years Outcomes and the new computing curriculum for key stage 1, it seems to be a little more vague.

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Programming Apps for Early Years and Key Stage 1

This has been a busy week to say the least! Not only am I preparing to move schools, I have been at 3 CPD events in two days and the new primary curriculum has been released (almost).

The 3 events were Computing at Schools (NTU Hub), TeachMeet Nottingham and The Festival of Innovation. At all 3 events I was involved in running workshops, but it was good to spend time listening to others and finding about about computing and programming. My good friend Peter Bevington (@PeteBevington) has great ideas for a new primary curriculum which he has already started embedding so do get in touch with him for your long term ICT plans!

Meeting other teachers is also great and that’s how I pick up new ideas. So here’s my favourite three Apps for programming on the iPad (the 4th being BeeBot which we all know and love). By the way, these are all FREE on AppStore!

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iPad Apps for Early Years: a few ideas to get you started.

 Staple Apps for your iPad

My Story

This app is a simple book creator app and is great for making multi-modal texts. Children can insert photographs, clipart, saved images. They can also record their voice and there are a range of mark making tools for them to write and record their ideas. Read more about introducing My Story on this post here.

Puppet Pals

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This is a puppet show app and children can quickly create a story with characters and backgrounds in 3 simple steps. The app records their voice and playback is instant. Puppet shows export as videos to the iPad’s camera roll.

Here is a good YouTube video which demonstrates the Puppet Pals App
Here is an example of children’s work from my class:

Puppet Pals is so versatile and can be used beyond story telling. It can support non-fiction, instruction texts, science and mathematics. Find out more about using Puppet Pals beyond story telling here.

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