It’s only Tuesday and it has already been a very busy week!

We have already had a very busy week and it’s only Tuesday. We have been practicing our play in our dancing groups (Mrs Rowlands and Mrs Davies must be exhausted!) and singing our songs and getting the words and actions just right!

As well as that our school has been dealing with one or two issues with Sefton regarding the content of our website (we can’t watch James Blunt in School – which I can’t really decide if it’s a good thing or not!) and one or two other things but we are slowly persuading people how effective the blog is as a teaching tool as well as all the other things that it can be used for.

Wednesday brings rehearsal in the morning and we are going to use “The Snowman” by Raymond Briggs as an theme for painting and writing.

You can find some information about this at

http://www.thesnowman.co.uk/

and

http://books.google.co.uk/books?as_auth=Raymond+Briggs&ots=sxBNZ7JAth&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=author-navigational

Oh and the best bit of news is that Mr Rowlands saved my computer from certain death! He is a true computer hero and when nearly your whole life is on one computer hard disk that is, indeed, a great honour!

James Blunt, triangles, computers and Champion Child

James Blunt, who drove lots of people a little bit crazy with his song “You’re Beautiful” has turned his attention to triangles……its great for shape work. Watch his performance….

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/o2Z6tDSb6c8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

My own computer is not very well at the moment and we’ll have to see if it can recover in time to be back in school on Monday….I hope so !

George was our champion child on Friday. We were especially pleased with his efforts with reading as well as being a cheerful soul to have in our class.

Promethean Staff Meeting

Rachel from Promethean came to teach us how to use our Activprimary voting whiteboards much better…….

A great place to start is http://www.prometheanworld.com/uk/

There are also some sites that can be used for resources and that fit perfectly into our activboards. They are….

www.rottentomatoes.com

http://www.itnsource.com/en/Home-Page/

http://www.britishpathe.com/

Thank you for coming Rachel, it was a very interesting and entertaining presentation. How many teachers know about ratio!! 

Zoho

Zoho is an online facility that is free and, well it looks terrific. I’m trying some stuff out on it and would like to do a story writing task. Click on the link to find the start of our first shared story.

http://writer.zoho.com/public/raff/The-Angry-Pirate/script

I’m not 100% sure about how things work in Zoho and I have a sneaky feeling that to enable a proper shared facility I need to set up a document and then invite collaborators by inviting them by email…….but I could be wrong. Try it and see.

Golden Rules for Golden Time

We have started Golden Time at Green Park and Year 1 are no exception. We share our fun, Friday activities with Y2 and the Reception Class as a reward for trying hard with our Golden Rules. These are:

If Golden rules are broken we lose five minute chunks of our Golden Time, but we do get the chance to earn the time back.

If you have any ideas for Golden Rules or activities for Golden Time let us know by leaving a comment in the usual way or by (and I hope it works) contributing to our new wiki by clicking on the link

http://raff.wiki.zoho.com/Ideas-for-Golden-Time.html

Hello again Y1

I’m just going for my lunch. I hope you had a nice morning and work hard this afternoon.

Hello Y1

I hope you are looking after Mrs Farmer today and singing nicely for Mrs Reed. I am in Wigan finding out about lots of fab stuff about ICT………it’s with Wigan LEA and they have got lots of great ideas for using ICT. I have found out about Penguins and will let you know later how to get it!

Numeracy Assessment

We use Wigan’s Numeracy Assessment documents to help with our own Numeracy Assessment. If you would like to look at them or use them, they can be found at

http://www.wiganschoolsonline.net/curriculum/maths/blockassess.shtm

The link can also be found in the Numeracy links section on the right hand side of the blog.

Tuesday

What a different day it was today. We started with Reading Club, then Sounds~Write, the we explored on our Whatever the Weather Walk and then when we came back we found out that that Mr Sutton (our IT friend) had left a message on our first voicethread……..so had Mrs Cassidy. Then we did a bit of Science Assessment and then a bit of mental maths.

In the afternoon we became the first class ever to use KIT http://www.kinesthetic.co.uk/1.html

at Green Park School and had a great time with the interactive voting system. Jack was our very first winner in our fastest finger alphabetical order game.

Y2 and Mr Hewer came in after last play to have a look at our IT talents and they were nicely impressed.

We finished with some singing for Christmas and finally we all went home……..Mr Rafferty tried to fix Mrs Brankin’s yellow whiteboard screen but couldn’t ………………..and then tried to fix Miss Gibson’s whiteboard screen that doesn’t show red colours but couldn’t……………..so he put in new projector bulbs for Miss Rice and Miss Blackham…….their classes should notice a big difference!

[kml_flashembed movie="http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=21173" width="480" height="360"/]

Another new toy!

We have another new thing to present our information. It’s called voicethread and you can leave comments by keyboard or, even better, by recording your voice. Fab!

(Sorry for the old pictures but my camera is in school……………….! We’ll do some more tomorrow.)

[kml_flashembed movie="http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=20709" width="500" height="600"/]

http://voicethread.com/share/20709/