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.