story telling

Once upon an iPad…

@MarcWithersey art, Drawing, Outdoors, photography, writing , , ,

Storytelling with photography and drawing tools is one of my favourite imaginative play activities in my Reception class.

In our ‘Who lives in Castles?’ enquiry children used the outdoor area to build huge castle structures with large blocks on our climbing equipment. The small world characters they wanted to use to retell the story of Rapunzel didn’t cut it, they were too small for their castles. The castles were too fragile for real life role play and the bricks would fall to the floor.

After taking a photograph of their castle structure with the iPad camera, I taught the children how to tap ‘Edit’ and use the ‘…’ button to access the Markup tools. 3 simple steps to navigate from a photograph to a mark making activity.

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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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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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Story & Coding with Dash and Path.

@MarcWithersey Coding, Computing, Design, Reading, Understanding the World , , , , , , , , ,

Coding in the Early Years is something that I have been tinkering with since the new primary curriculum became statutory. I’ve planned unplugged computing strategies which support the later use of BeeBots and practised skills on a suite of iPad apps designed to apply this skill of coding.

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This year I’ve been lucky enough to get our hands on Dash robots that connect to our class iPads via Bluetooth. This robots have a suite of apps which progress from early control skills (like a remote controlled car) through to Scratch-like coding blocks that support the Year 6 objectives.

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An Early Years Shape Book about Bonfire Night

@MarcWithersey Apps, Collaboration, iPads, Maths, Technology, Understanding the World , , , , , ,

We are getting ready to teach the children how to make Maths Journals again this year, but before we hand children their own iPads, we need to model book creating in maths first. You can read more about Maths Journals here.

Bonfire Night is a British festival remembering The Gunpowder Plot from over 400 years ago. Guy Fawkes attempted to murder King James who would be in The Houses of Parliament on November 5th 1605 (I hope I have that date right?). Guy Fawkes obviously failed as The Houses of Parliament still stand today and every year on November 5th our children visit a bonfire and watch fireworks which depict what could have happened should Guy Fawkes have been successful.

This festival, like many others, lends itself well to cross-curricular learning. However, it also lends itself well to my connected classes project as our friends across Europe and America will not be celebrating Bonfire Night. Therefore it is a great opportunity to use technology to share this festival with them.

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A Local Area Study with iPads in Early Years

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

Last half term our investigations were all around our local area. The outcomes of this project would focus on children talking about their home, community, school and their place in the world. As well as the regular practise involved in this kind of learning in the early years, technology enabled us to share this learning in a purposeful way.

First up in the project came International Dot Day which put a spot light on children from other parts of the world who shared the same interests as us. You can read more about International Dot Day here. It’s a great festival that shows children how they are connected to the rest of the world. This initiated conversations about our place in the world, where we live and what it is like here.

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