Forest Schools

This is a programme to encourage schools to take their children outdoors, no matter what the weather. The presentation today talked about how children in Foundation benefited from outdoor experiences, looking at fallen leaves, acorns, jumping over logs, following a 'night-line', firelighting and generally getting very muddy.

There are often so few opportunities to get outside in the curriculum, that this initiative was about developing the curriculum around outdoor adventure at a very early age. I thought it gave children the experiences they wouldn't ordinarily receive at home, and for the older children, especially, give them real-life experience for writing reports, developing oral literacy too.

The main issues for enabling this to happen will be identifying a local woodland that can be used and how to transport the pupils to the site. The school who presented this session used parents to drive the pupils to the woodland which isn't necessarily possible for all schools. A colleague suggested borrowing a minibus from the local secondary school as an alternative solution.

Escape to Castle Condor

To be honest, I found this presentation more difficult to follow, perhaps because I wasn't clear about the connection between the activity and it's influence on children's mathematical awareness. The programme was designed to support pupils with common errors that they made in the SATs mathematics test.

The stimulus of this work was the Castle Condor set of resources, which has been developed by the Essex SAIS Team. Pupils wrote playscripts and made storyboards for their stories and then performed them using a Digiblue camera to record the footage. I enjoyed hearing how the detective work was wide-ranging, from deciphering clues to taking finger prints.

Was the connection between this activity and mathematics about developing children's awareness of problem solving and investigative skills? If you read this and know more than me, please do comment below as I'd love to be enlightened!

Podcasting at Greenstead Junior School

Greenstead Junior School have been podcasting using an iPod Video device with a plug in microphone. The microphone makes use of the iPod's Dock connector and therefore makes recording children's voices and sounds very easy.

The teachers reported that pupils weren't at all familiar with hearing their own voices played back and quickly developed their ability to speak more concisely without the teacher giving input. Pupils also improved the quality of what was spoken after several practices and wanting their recording to be absolutely perfect without coughs, sneezes and whatever else!

A portable speaker system was also purchased to facilitate the playback of the iPod recordings.

It was suggested the whole kit cost around £200.

There were lots of opportunity to share the recordings with a wider audience using the Podcast function of sending it to iTunes and having the podcast feed available from there.

I really like the idea of using a portable device to record the sound rather than record straight into the computer. Portability is really important, especially when you consider learning taking place everywhere, including outdoors. I'd also like to find devices which are a bit cheaper than the iPod's and as in any school, accessibility to these devices is crucial for success if pupils make decisions about their usage rather than planned in the curriculum by the teacher.

Cha Cha Slide some more

It's not just the kids who have been learning a thing or two about how to dance. I've had a tremendously positive experience teaching it - an area of the curriculum I've not felt particularly confident leading before.

So why the shift? There could be a number of reasons,

1. I'm more prepared to take risks than ever before. Who says that when you teach you have to be right all of the time?

2. I didn't assume a leading role, instead sharing the lead with pupils who wanted to model some dance routines. I facilitated the session rather than controlled.

3. Having the benefit of watching model dance lessons and assimilating this understanding into a style or approach that sits comfortably with me and the children.

4. I used familiar songs:

- Macarena (Los Del Rio)
- Cha Cha Slide (Casper)
- Reach (for the stars) (S Club 7)
- Saturday Night (Whigfield)
- Candyman (Christina Aguilera)

Here are two groups of girls in my class who are performing their dance to the rest of the class.

A Common Whipping

At Scouts this evening, we were showing the fine art of whipping and splicing a length of rope. Here is Luke proudly showing off his Common Whipping.

Orion Scout Troop Website

I've just been revamping the home page of the Orion Online website. I've managed to find a way of taking a specific content label in a Blogger.com blog and produce an RSS feed.

Hanningfield Reservoir beauty

It's been a beautiful day today, blue sky and sunshine. I've not been to Hanningfield Reservoir for ages, so I went for a walk in the conservation area. This picture was taken looking out from a bird observation point at the waters edge. Both the wildlife and landscape looked so inviting in the warm, wintery sunshine.

Pancakes: just read the instructions

Here is young Tom, a scout who has successfully made pancake batter and tossed his pancake without it landing on the floor or roof beams.

Although this was a fun activity, we were training the boys in the art of reading instructions. Few followed them which left them making several mistakes, or should I say created several 'learning opportunities. It is a life skill, but in this day and age, is the printed text just not stimulating and interesting enough to read? What if the instructions were a podcast or a video tutorial? Would more have had greater success and neding less adult input?

Truth is, as long as it was food and somewhere close to edible, the scouts simply stopped caring about how they got there!

Junk mail ticketing

I never ever imagined writing or even giving the time to a piece of
junk mail, but this one caught my eye. It's quite a novel idea but left me wondering if Royal Mail postmen are having to put these through letter boxes the right way round? Turn it the other way and the effect has all but disappeared.

Shared Reading

There was a brilliant moment today when children in my class chose to pair up and share the enjoyment of reading with each other. This was totally unprompted by me as I was slow in discovering what they were doing. I took a sneaky picture of them working quietly, reading to each other and retelling the story.

Road Safety Talk

Pupils were given a Road Safety talk by someone from Essex County Council. They brought along a model car and ramp which showed the effect of not wearing a seat belt after a collision at just 10mph. When the presenter asked the children how many of them don't wear a seat belt regularly, about 5 hands went up. That's about 20% of the class. It was staggered by the statistic when it is so well known how seat belts save lives. Incredible.

Pupils were clearly fascinated by the model. They all wanted to have a go which would have made the demonstration perhaps a bit more hands-on and bring about greater opportunity to remember some of what had been mentioned during the presentation.

Xserve power

I'm simply staggered at just how beautifully engineered Apple computers are and I haven't even switched it on yet!

This powerhouse features 2 Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and 4GB of memory, together with over 1 terabyte of storage space. Although this isn't my server, it is interesting to reflect back on my first WWW server, a Macintosh IIcx featuring a 16 MHz processor and 20MB of memory. Before I adopted Minnie the Minx, she was someone's work machine. Imagine having all that power today!

The ideal party playground

Max chose the Hungry Horse ball park as the venue for his birthday
party. 17 of his friends came along too. The fun wasn't just for the
children as adults had a go too...

Sedan Chairs

Scouts had quite (!) a lot of fun racing up and down the hall in Sedan Chairs having learnt how to tie a square lashing. Later, we gave them a bowl of water to carry on their laps which made the event all the more exciting. This is how learning something telatibely uninteresting can be made both fun and engaging.

Scouts learning how to tie a square lashing

Colin Burrough, Scout Leader of 3rd Billericay, Orion Troop, shows the scouts how to tie a square lashing. This is training for completing the pioneer badge which we later used in a rather fun activity, Sedan Chairs. See above!

Happy Birthday Max

Scout Swimming Gala

The annual Billericay and Wickford Scout Swimming Gala took place this evening at Gloucester Park. Although our scouts did well, we weren't able to achieve enough points between the 6 scouts who participated in order to challenge the top teams. Maybe next year? Congratulations to Flo, Liam, Ben, Tom, Joseph and Ben who represented Orion Troop, 3rd Billericay. Peter Taylor, who was the Team Manager, did a fabulous job at organising the youngsters into their respective races.

Mechanical advantage - it's just physics

Scouts in Orion Troop learnt how to use levers and pulley systems to gain mechanical advantage. Although you never get something for nothing, some very little scouts were able to lift some of the heavier ones!

New blog entry using another mobile device

Hello world.

My Birthday Cake

Every year, it seems to be a tradition for an 'island' cake to be made for my birthday. I think it's something to do with my love of coconut which is the main component of the sea and land. It's stuck down with syrup which makes it properly yummy.

At Macworld 2008 BBC event, London

Here listening to Steve Jobs release new Apple products.

Programming with Lego Mindstorm

Here pupils are using control technology to gain a greater understanding of programming. They were set a range of tasks to complete from launching a liferaft to fetching a satellite. Looked like good fun to me with great learning outcomes.

Learner Voice @ BETT

Horse play!

Scouts on a hiking expedition came across some horses in a field which seemed to want to join us on our walk!

Tactile tools for learning

This lightbox is covered with sand and allows pupils to draw shapes, patterns and letters. It's very similar to my iPod Touch and Sketch app, except it doesn't email the pictures! Great for play in this particular primary school.