Following our virtual visit to a theme park, we are going to be creating and sharing our own Televison adverts. As part of this we will need lots of exciting photographs from the park. We will be using Pic Collage to put ourselves straight into the action. Here is an example where Mr Patterson, Mrs Ovington and two brave volunteers have dared to test one of the rides. Looks like fun! We all know that we come to school to learn? It is great that we work hard in lessons to improve our writing skills, but it is even better when we take control of our learning and look for opportunities to extend our skills outside of the classroom (at home). We have had a very interesting discussion about whether or not we should have the popular game Minecraft on our school iPads. Many of us have taken the time to flex our intellectual muscles by giving up some of our time to write persuasive arguments. Some arguing for the game, others against. All of work is shared and celebrated on our class 'Extended Learning Wall'. Feel free to drop by and read some of our work. The debate is still on-going so if you would like to take part, bring your writing to Year 5 or post your comments to the Minecraft debate below. This week all of our work is based around a virtual visit to a theme park courtesy of the appropriately named iPad app 'Theme Park'.
We used the screen grab function to take images of the attractions we liked. The remainder of our lesson today focused on creating a poster using the app 'PicCollage' which would remind us of the attractions at the park as well as help us to persuade others to visit the park in the future. Tomorrow we will be using our posters as inspiration for a persuasive advert for television or radio. Here are just a few examples of our work: Two of our pupils helping at our market stall on Saturday. Thank you very much to everyone who supported us on a rather damp and drizzly day. We were successful in our bid for £2500 which will go towards more iPads.
This week in numeracy, we will be learning about angles. We will be learning to recognise different types of angles as well as measuring them using a protractor. We will learn to spot: Right angles - Angles that are exactly 90 degrees. Acute angles - Angles that are smaller than a right angles (smaller than 90 degrees) Obtuse angles - Angles that are larger than a right angle (Larger than 90 degrees but less than 180 degrees. Here is an entertaining video to help us remember about these types of angle. We will be concluding our half term (Friday) with a literacy filled day at Tanfield School. As part if this we will be visited by the authors, 'The Two Steves'. Team points if you can find any of their books in the library. In addition to this, you can also visit their website at: The2steves.net Next week in our literacy lessons, we will be visiting a theme park and basing our literacy around what we discover there. Take a look at the mind map below. Can you see anything that you are looking forward to? Some our work will include: Using iPads, taking photographs, creating posters, recording video clips, photo editing, creating a persuasive T.V. advert, writing and performing radio scripts, up-levelling and self assessing our writing and writing a recount of our trip. Phew! That's a lot to be looking forward to. Both Year 5 and Year 6 have been working hard in science throughout the term, learning about plants and animals. Today we worked with a Year 6 partner creating mind maps showing what we have found out in the past few weeks. Find out what we do with them next week. Here are some examples but for more head over to the Year 6 blog: http://6tanfieldlea.weebly.com/ Fantastic News!! Well done to Lauren who scored a maximum 72 out of 72 (100%) on her 'Big Maths Total Recall' today. (18.10.13) A superb achievement! How can we challenge you now Lauren? Do you think you can be even quicker next week? Although a console game, rather than an iPad titile, Fifa Ultimate Team was used as a means of investigating the childrens knowledge of fractions, decimals and percentages after a week or so of lessons. The part of the game used as part of the lesson was accessed via the iPad App ' Football Club' from EA Sports. The example shown was a lesson starter (10minutes) and plenary session (5-10minutes) To provide the children with a real life example of where they could find fractions, decimals and percentages, we looked at some of the cards from the Xbox / Playstation game 'Fifa Ultimate Team'. Using a Powerpoint, that simulated opening a pack of cards from the game, the children were presented with a range of Premier League footballers. From this they were presented with the following task to assess their current understanding. What ratios can we find in a pack of Ultimate Team cards? What proportions (fractions) can we find? What percentages or decimal values can you find? Look at the card colour (Bronze, Silver, Gold) Look at the team played for. Look at the nationality. Children then worked individually, or in pairs to generate as many ratios, fractions, decimals or percentages as they could from the cards shown. (Apologies from the photo quality) At the end of the starter, the children were informed that all of the cards had been put up for sale (which I had done prior to the lesson) on the game's auction house.
At the end of the lesson (looking at fraction and percentage word problems) we revisited the cards to see which ones had sold. 6 of the cards had sold (2 silver and 4 gold). The children were then challenged to create a word problem that reflected what had actually happened to the cards, including a fraction or percentage as an answer. Although quite a challenging task to end the lesson, there were some good examples created. Your school needs you!
This Saturday (19th October), the Stanley Town Council are holding an event at the new North Durham Academy building from 9.45am - 2pm. Different groups (including our school) are applying for a grant from the Town Council. All you have to do is turn up and vote for 3 good causes - anyone over 5 from the Stanley area can take part, so bring the whole family along.... It should only take 15 minutes, but could make a big difference to our school community! Small amount of effort, big rewards..... PicCollage is a fantastic App that allows the creation of colourful and attractive posters. It is a great way of showcasing what has been going on in class. Similarly, children can quickly create effective posters showing an aspect of learning (for example see a Year 5 poster based on a trip to a themepark at: http://5tanfieldlea.weebly.com/1/post/2013/10/today-we-visited-a-theme-park.html) However, PicCollage is also has hidden potential beyond posters. One example of this is the 'frames' function, where the page can be split into equal parts for pictures or photos to be placed. An excellent example of this in a Year 1 classroom can be seen at http://mrparkinsonict.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/pic-collage-more-than-just-making.html. Here children have used PicCollage to sequence pictures from the Gingerbread man and vocabularly that could be later used in story writing. Similarly, in the same blog post, another good suggestion would be to add photos taken for a particular task that could be then sequences and used as part of instruction writing. Another useful tool, that can be sometimes overlooked, is the ability to 'Clip' a photo. By double tapping on a photograph, you can draw around the part you wish to keep and crop (or clip) away the rest of the photo. The clipped photo can easily be overlayed onto another photo to completly trasform the original shot. This is a great trick for placing children in places that would be otherwise impossible. Take the photos below where a photo taken in the warmth and safety of the classroom has been transformed into a trip to the North Pole or the Grand Canyon. By combining the two suggestions above (using the frames and clipping options) it is possible to use PicCollage as a way of planning stories. The screen can be quickly set up into a comic strip appearance using the frames option. Photos can then be added to show the progression of a story and key words, openers or phrases added as prompts for each part. If desired the children could even add themselves as characters in the events of their writing. In the example below, children planned their own adventure story based on the events of the game 'Temple Run'. For more on our Temple Run lessons, please visit:
http://5tanfieldlea.weebly.com/1/post/2013/11/ipads-in-education-temple-run.html References: Many of the ideas here have also been referred to by Mr Parkinson's excellent blog: http://mrparkinsonict.blogspot.co.uk/ Squeebles Addition & Subtraction is a fun App designed to practice mental addition and subtraction skills. As one App of many in a series of educational apps (Search for Squeebles in the App Store to Browse multiplication, fractions and spelling alternatives), the game provides a fun and interesting way for children to practice their basic numeracy skills. The premise of the game is simple. Answer questions to earn stars to be spent on racing cars and Squeebles to drive the unlocked cars. Children can choose to focus on Additon, subtraction, find the missing values by using their knowledge of the inverse or take a quick test. All to earn the stars they need to upgrade their vehicles. Once enough questions have been answered, users will be granted a short period of game time to see how far they can race their cars and try to set their own personal record. Before returning to the maths to earn further upgraded and more game time. Simple but effective! Each area of questioning comes in 4 levels from addition of single digit numbers up to 3digit + 3 digit, with the same for subtraction.Teachers can control the levels children having access to, ensuring that the challenge is appropriate at all times. Too hard? Difficulty can be adjusted to suit the needs of individuals. Once children have collected enough stars, they can trade in their winnings for a range of racing cars. Then, take their car to the track to see just how far they can race it! Only by playing the game and pushing their numbers skills, can the children earn the fastest cars and the best unlocks. Class lists can be set up quickly, giving each child their own account in which they can collect their own rewards. This makes Squeebles as useful app for the single iPad classroom. The teacher controls allow each child to have an appropriate challenge set. For younger or less confident children, the harder levels can be disabled until necessary. Whereas for older or more confident children, the opposite can be applied with the easier calculations not presented as an option during their game time. Finally, teachers are able to view the progress of children with statistics for their performance monitored at all times. Squeebles keeps track of their accuracy making it easy to spot if the challenge needs increasing or adjusting . As well as this, reports will show which questions the children are finding tricky and need further work on during lessons. Check out more from the Squeebles range in the App Store. Every day is a busy day, in Year 5, and today was no different. We had the extrememly difficuly task of chosing our new School Council representatives.
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