Goodbye!

This will be my last post, as I'm leaving to begin my secondment at the end of this week. Thanks to those of you who have told me that this blog has been useful.
I'll leave you with one last piece of advice in the video above...(thanks to Hilery Williams for reminding me of this!)
Goodbye!

Purple Mash - cross curricular inspiration

You really must check this out - it's an outstanding website with a wealth of activities for all curricular areas, including writing frames, maths games, interactive sorting and matching activities, and art activities to name but a few! It's from the makers of 2simple software, and as we don't have any of their resources in school yet, this website provides a great opportunity to use their amazing creative tools.
Purple Mash

Think Draw

This is a great ICT art activity. You can create collage style pictures very much like the style of Archimboldo - I remember spending ages with children cutting pictures of fruit from magazines to make these kind of displays! (Not that I think you should stop doing magazine collages!) You can choose from different themes to create your picture, including flowers, fruit, animals, facial features, gothic patterns, candy, beads and animals.
Think Draw website

Easter

Click here for the Easter story and lots of interactive activities for your whiteboards.
The fantastic communication4all website has lots of Easter activities here
The Easter story for middle and upper classes can be found here.

The brick testament website also has the Easter story.

Wonderful website for Interactive Whiteboards

This site used to charge for it's use, with the odd freebie which I used, but now it's all free! It provides a comprehensive set of interactive activities for literacy, numeracy, science, history, geography and ICT. Truly wonderful cross-curricular ideas and great fun for children to learn, I'll be checking here regularly for starter and plenary activities, I recommend this highly! The iboard website.

CFE videos

This is the latest of 4 satirical videos about Curriculum for Excellence. Whatever your thoughts on the new curriculum, this is very funny.
The rest can be viewed here. Get the green folders!

Giving children a voice - Bugbears on CBBC

Bugbears is a webpage where children can record themselves talking about any topic and post it anonymously. They can make their own animated bugbear character and give their character a voice by recording their own (disguising it if they want). Visitors can respond by giving hugs, showing respect, letting them know they feel the same, or giving advice. The purpose of the site is to give children the opportunity to share their feelings, gaining suport and building empathy. It is strictly moderated. Worth a look.

Phone texting helps children to spell

Interesting result for research team - apparently texting helps with children's spelling, as to be able to abbreviate a word (such as later to l8tr) phonological awareness is still required. Who'd have thunk it?
The BBC report is here.

Inspirations series on Teacher's TV

click here

Hallelujah?

Click here

You Tube nostalgia - but useful in class!

I'll be using these with primary 1 this week...

ICT topics

This wonderful web page links to loads of great ICT activities, many of which I've previously posted about, but also some interesting looking ones which I've yet to explore.
Click here for Parkfield ICT.

Pictorial Calendar

This will be great for speaking and listening - a calendar with a picture for every day of the year, relating to an event on that day.
Clickhere

ICT Inspiration

This website has literally hundreds of ideas for using ICT across the curriculum. This slideshow below shows some geography ideas, but the site covers every subject. (Click the full screen icon next to the page number to see it properly):

The site can be found here.
You could spend ages on here if you have the time...

Roy the Zebra - Wonderful games to help reading skills

This lovely website is home to a package of interactive games, stories and resources that have been developed to help emerging readers learn to read. Click here for Roy the Zebra. I'll be using it this difficult first week back to try and motivate my class!

The end of Sparklebox?

If any of you read the TES forums, you may have read about this. It seems many LEAs in England have banned Sparklebox access in schools. To see why click here. Another reason can be seen here.
Very sad news, and it seems many users of the TES forum feel it is now morally wrong to be using the Sparklebox materials. It's not known if the site will continue to operate for much longer. Maybe it's time to make our own resources more often. The decision to use it is yours!

Resource to support Curriculum for Excellence Literacy

This site aims to help teachers by drawing together and categorising many of the free Literacy teaching and learning resources on the web.
Borders Literacy

Other blogs you should read

By adding a link to this blog on the scotedublogs website, I've received a few more visitors recently, one of which is Hilery Williams who keeps a personal blog here and posts on the East Lothian Support for All blog.
I highly recommend paying these a visit, Hilery has written some thought provoking and entertaining pieces on many aspects of education. It's inspirational to find someone sharing their thoughts in this way, and it's made me consider the future of this blog - after considering stopping I realise that I'm blogging for myself as well as others.

Christmas

You can click here to see the Christmas posts from last year, including Clicker grids, games, songs, art and crafts, and RME resources.

Storybird

Storybird Quick Tour from Storybird on Vimeo.

Watch this short tutorial to learn how to create super cute stories - gorgeous!
Click here for the Storybird website.