Sesame Street helping children who have experienced trauma

You may have heard about the fantastic work Sesame Street does to support children, including their inclusion of a character with autism on the show, and now they have announced a new portal on their website to support children who have been through traumatic experiences. Take a look - it's great.

Other activity portals featured by Sesame Street in Communities feature resources on dealing with bullying, grief, coping with incarceration and dealing with emergencies. It would be a great resource to use alongside Emotion Works with younger children.

Wonder by RJ Palacio

This website lets you create a portrait in the style of the book cover for Wonder by RJ Palacio, and you can choose a precept to add.

St Andrew's Day

Education Scotland have a great list of suggestions for learning about Scotland as St Andrew's Day approaches:

5 ways to celebrate St Andrew's Day

This video looks good for older children:

Numeracy websites

Here are a the websites that were recommended at our recent development session to support numeracy in class (Click the text under each picture to visit the website):

Coin Game

Transum Maths

Don't forget about about the Primary Maths goes that should be installed on all computers (let me know if you don't have these!) in the Start menu, in the Interactive Resources folder. There are fantastic time, measure, money and times tables games and supporting worksheets to name but a few - definitely worth exploring. You should find something to support pretty much every area of maths.

Vocabulary Ninja

This is worth a look - a website that shows a word of the day for upper or lower primary, and a literacy question to try. 

Here's an example of what's on the website, and below is an example of a class activity that was posted on Twitter.

Auto Draw

Auto Draw is amazing - a website which lets you draw and then corrects your doodle - a bit like predictive text, but for pictures if that makes sense! It is also great just as a simple to use drawing program you could use on your SmartBoard. It can be accessed from a computer, phone, tablet or iPad. Watch the video below:

Once Upon a Picture

Once Upon a Picture is great looking website, similar to Pobble 365 I wrote about a while ago.
Its got pictures to be used either to inspire writing, promote use of interesting vocabulary, to teach skills such as inference, deduction and prediction, or to use for cross-curriculare lessons. Watch the trailer below:

Once Upon a Picture.. on Vimeo.

Happy New Year!

It's the time of year when we often reflect on what happened in the past year, and what could happen in the year ahead. You may wish to engage your class in some reflection or even making new year's resolutions. Oxfam have a good resource for using with upper primary, which can be downloaded here in a couple of clicks.It encourages children to consider change and how to make a difference in the world - some great thought provoking stuff.

There's a post here from last year about the Japanese new year tradition of making daruma dolls with a video and how to guide for making your own.

More videos for Emotion Talks/ Building Resilience

The first video shows a tiny bird learning to gradually persevere to overcome their fears. It would be great to pause the video and create speech or thought bubbles for what the character is saying at different parts of the movie, including aspects of the sequencer. The signs are subtle, but you can see body sensations - for example, when the bird's tummy rumbles when he is scared, and the expressions on his face show him grow in confidence to becoming excited, proud and confident. I've added some screenshots under the video if you want to use some still images from the film - just right click to copy or save them.

 





This is a cute Christmas film, in which a snowman has to cope with the wait for Christmas:




This shows a character in a dangerous environment who is able to cope with the help of someone else:

Tumbleweed Tango from Humble + Postal on Vimeo.

Videos for Emotion Talks

Using video can be a powerful method for learning and teaching. They can be a great way to learn skills for comprehension, deduction and inference. Some of the clips we've looked at before in development sessions are below to save you searching for them.




Further sources for film clips:

• Film trailers are published on YouTube and Vimeo - a good way to watch scary clips, or ways to build atmosphere.
• The Kid Should See This - great to see awe inspiring videos for discussion/ further activities on body sensations or other aspects of the sequencer
• The Literacy Shed - worth searching for a huge range of emotive films
• Any posts on here with video clips are now tagged at the side (ETvideo)

Roald Dahl Day

This year will be the 100th year since Roald Dahl's birth. The Roald Dahl website has lesson plans based on his stories, games, activities and information. There is a pack full of worksheets and activities for children which you can download here.
The trailer for the new BFG movie could be good to inspire some writing or discussion:



The Mathematics Shed website has several downloadable worksheets suitable for all ages, including 'Count the objects in Mt Twit's beard', 'George's Marvellous Measuring' and sheets of word problems based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

ICT Tools for Teaching

This website has been around for a while now, and you might know about the spinner random name picker:

and there are loads of other fantastic tools that have been added for using on your Smartboard, or for children using in ICT/ literacy lessons. For example, this headline generator:

and this one:

There are lots more interesting tools to check out. Go to www.classtools.net

Inspiring Videos

The Present from Jacob Frey on Vimeo.
This is a lovely little short animated film which would be great to use in class, and could be used in a variety of ways. You can also watch it here. There are ideas for writing at The Literacy Shed website. I think it would be great to use and refer to the Emotions Talk sequencer, as you see the range of emotions expressed by the main character, and you could discuss strategies for feeling better. It might be good to pause the video before the character opens the present and reflect on when we feel happy, then reflect on his reaction to the present. It also lends itself well for work on resilience and growth mindset.

You might have seen this on TV - It could be fantastic as a stimulus to discuss positive self talk. The Paralympics start on the 7th of September.

Code Studio

This is the website we've talked about a couple of times in development sessions:

https://studio.code.org/

You can learn about coding at the same time as the children! We have Scratch and Kodu installed on all computers in the ICT suite if you want to then move onto these. I've used Scratch before, and it is the same as the coding blocks the children use on the code studio courses, and I have some Scratch resources if anyone would like to give it a go.

Guided access on iPad - 'lock' an app

It's possible to set your iPad up to prevent children switching between apps - you can 'lock' the iPad to one app until you change it.

Go to settings, general, accessibility, the select guided access, and tap the switch to turn it on. Choose a numeric passcode you'll remember. Now when an app is open, triple click the home button. You'll be asked to enter your passcode, then the app cannot be closed until you triple click the home button and enter the passcode again. 

You can also disable parts of the screen, for example if you want to prevent any settings being changed within an app, by drawing a circle around the part of the screen you want disable when you triple click to open the guided access settings. 

Scuilwab website - Scots resources

The scuilwab is fur awbodie that wints tae enjoy an improve theri Scots, takkin tent o Curriculum for Excellence. The wabsteid has the authority o the Scottish Language dictionaries ahint it.

Click here for Scuilwab

Safe Searching

This website from Dorling Kindersley is a great one-stop website for safe searching for Primary Pupils, with information on a vast amount of topics. It also has quizzes video and topical news.  It could be used for project research, or if children are doing a personal research topic - they could use the information to create their own presentation.

Star Wars Intro Creator

This website is amazing - you can type in your own text to create your own Star Wars intro! I've made one for P6a you can view here, and you can have a go yourself here.

Pobble 365

This is an interesting teaching website: Pobble 365 puts a picture online each day along with questions to discuss and ideas for writing. You could use the sentence ideas as part of a grammar lesson, or the whole thing for a Big Writing lesson.

The Numeracy Shed

If you have any spare time (!) then this website is well worth a look for loads of maths and numeracy resources, including starter activities, printable mats and games, as well as videos and teaching ideas.

http://www.mathematicshed.com/