Category Archives: Second

All Posts, Literacy, Second, Technologies

Games Design and Profiling in St Andrew’s RC Primary School

February 26, 2014 Miss Hill Leave a comment

I’m currently a permanent supply teaching working at St Andrew’s Primary School in a P6 class in Dundee.

I decided to use Kodu as a stimulus to engage my class in technologies and 21st century literacy skills.

Kodu lets kids create games on the PC and XBox via a simple visual programming language.

I used the built in tutorials to give the pupils a brief introduction to Kodu and then allowed them to explore and experiment further. I didn’t have a great knowledge of games design or how to use Kodu prior to this Interdisciplinary Learning project and learnt with the children.

In their IDL folders and through discussions the pupil’s reflected on the skills that they were developing such as creating, evaluting, analysing, applying, understanding and problem solving. The pupils worked in co-operative learning teams to plan, design and evaluate their games.

To make the IDL project more relevant and engaging to the pupils I invited a Dundee Based Games Design company called Future Fossils to work with my class. This provided an understanding of careers and opportunities in game design.The pupils responded very well to this and were very keen and enthusiastic to show off their work and have a real designer test and feedback on their game.

Throughout the IDL project the activities that we engaged in included:

shared learning intentions and success criteria
storyboards of our game design
used Kodu to design our environment
created simple programs which we then developed further into more complex scenarios
designed game covers
wrote instructions for loading Kodu and playing their own game
wrote imagineative background stories
planned setting descriptions
wrote a theme tune for our games
to help the pupils understand the need for programming we acted out programming on whiteboards
took screenshots

This was one of the most successful IDL projects I have done with a class. I feel that it was very inclusive and the children gained a wealth of skills which they were then able to reflect on.

All Posts, Featured, Sciences, Second, Third

Physics Fun in Space

August 27, 2012 User deactivated Leave a comment

The following film is a recording of a science show for primary schools presented by Dr Alan Bruce of the University of Abertay to a mixed audience of primary 6 & 7 pupils. It has been developed as a spin out from the popular Tayside Space School and shows a series of fun science (particularly Physics) experiments. It is designed to promote science in a fun and entertaining manner using space and space travel as a means of introducing basic scientific principles such as gravity and electricity and highlighting their importance in our everyday lives.

The following presentation was one of a series of 12 shows enjoyed by more that 800 pupils from across Dundee and Angus during 2012 and the University would like to thank the Institute of Physics in Scotland for providing funding to support the development and delivery of the shows.

Pupils will be shocked, surprised and entertained by the show, but more importantly Alan and the team at Abertay, hope the show will excite and encourage them to take their first steps towards becoming Scotland’s scientists of the future.

Leave a comment if you use the film with pupils e.g. What are their reactions? Will you plan any follow up practical work?

You can contact Alan at A.bruce@abertay.ac.uk and see the video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRTDqf0IyE0&feature=youtu.be

All Posts, Dundee Active Learning, Expressive Arts, Featured, Health and Wellbeing, Health Promoting, Other Big Stories, Parental Involvement, Second, Technologies, Transition

A year in the life of Barnhill P7

November 16, 2011 Mr Smith Leave a comment

Our P7 pupils at Barnhill were involved in keeping a pictorial and video diary of the year. We then created a movie file and used free music from glow to play over the top of our images and videos. Have a look at the video below which is streamed through our glow wiki page. The children loved making this and enjoyed the ICT aspect but also learned much about working co-operatively.

https://wikis.glowscotland.org.uk/@api/deki/files/30368/=Barnhill_P7_end_of_year_film.wmv

Second, Transition

E-Portfolios at St.Ninian’s P.S.

November 15, 2011 User deactivated Leave a comment

St Ninian’s RC Primary School

Primary 7 and Miss McEwan have had lots of help from Mrs Henderson to create our own e-portfolios. We now all have our own personal journal of our learning and achievements. We have just begun to create posts and categorise our posts. We hope they will become tools in our lifelong learning journal.

By P.7 pupil

All Posts, Featured, Languages, Literacy, Other Big Stories, Second, Third

‘Find your inner zombie’

November 11, 2011 User deactivated Leave a comment

I was excited to enter my newly qualified teaching year on the advent of Curriculum for Excellence in 2010, and was looking forward to delivering creative lessons throughout the curriculum.

Teaching English, I found I had endless opportunity to not only create new lessons but modify existing lesson plans. The Secondary English curriculum requires pupils to experience a wide variety of writing genres, which cover the main writing outcomes. Towards the end of the year, my S1 pupils were required to write a transactional piece. The purpose of this writing task is to convey information, and topics such as ‘how to care for a pet’ are used.

Throughout the year, I attended a few TeachMeets and listened to various speakers discuss how to motivate. In one visit, we had a speaker from the Scottish Book Trust who told us to ‘find our inner zombie,’ as the children really engaged with this current topic. Although I had discussed Zombies with my pupils when we discussed childrens’ books, or T.V. programmes, I had never integrated them into my curriculum before this writing task.

The whole school cross-curricular week was approaching, and this time the topic was Rapid Response. I chose to engage with this theme by discussing disasters with the intention of creating a transactional piece of writing.

We started off by researching past disasters, hitting reading outcomes throughout this process. The pupils engaged with the texts they were using and gathered information, summarised, organised, took notes, prioritised and created new texts (Eng 3.12a, Lit 3.14a, Lit 3.15a, Lit 3.16a, Eng 3.17a) from these pieces. We then compared environmental disasters with chemical, nuclear and man-made disasters. Using real-life examples from newspapers, the pupils then used the computers to find a story of a person who had survived these disasters.

By investigating real life stories, the pupils were able to engage with the effects of these disasters, and explore the causes of these incidents. By using these stories as stimulus and exploring other people’s rights we also hit Health and Wellbeing Outcomes. The pupils found the causes of some man-made disasters thought provoking, and we were able to have moral discussions about this.

The outcome task I set the pupils was related to the Zombie phenomenon. We moved on from disasters to discuss apocalyptic versions of disasters, focusing on The Bee Movie and more science fiction type scenarios. We discussed a zombie apocalypse at great length and the information the pupils could bring to the discussion was immense! During this discussion, we examined old ‘Protect and Survive’ adverts from previous decades, which the children found very intriguing. They discussed the various media that can be used to convey information. At this point, we delved into various types of transactional writing, which ensured the pupils could be successful in this task.

The pupils created a Microsoft Publisher brochure entitled “How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse.”

For higher ability pupils, their brochure contained a lot of writing, whereas the lower ability pupils concentrated on features of informative writing, such as bullet points, sequential instructions, and simple facts. Pupils then used ScribbleMaps to scribble on a map of Dundee and alert the public to the safe zones, water supplies, infected areas, and shelter zones. The pupils loved designing routes through their own town and engaging with local landmarks and shopping centres in order to create their map. Creating this map also served as an opportunity for assessment of understanding, literacy and cooperative working.

Each pupil gained a lot from this unit and were all engaged while creating, and then presenting their brochure. Some pupils extended this further and showed examples of what tools were needed to survive, while some focused on the basics of the task. I think making this extremely relevant tapped into some of the more disengaged pupils, and was therefore an appealing task from the start. The work speaks for itself, and I am currently using the same template for an S3 class. Watch this space…

Expressive Arts, Featured, First, Glow, Languages, Literacy, Mathematics, Numeracy, Other Big Stories, Second, Social Studies, Technologies

Creating a newspaper and motivating challenging pupils

October 17, 2011 User deactivated 2 Comments

During Term One, my Primary 7 class decided they would like to create a Class Newspaper. Within my class, as within most classes, I have pupils with challenging behaviour. I wanted all pupils in my class to be fully motivated throughout this learning context. I also wanted my pupils to have ownership of their class newspaper.

Wallwisher Blog post — This is the interactive wall created to allow the pupils to share their planning.

The pupils were eager to get started writing their articles. However, as a class we decided that it would be a good idea to establish a ‘planning wall’ first. One of my pupils asked if we could set up a Glow Group to compliment the planning wall in our classroom. My pupils were eager to add to their planning wall even when not at school. I set up an interactive planning wall using wallwisher.com. This allowed the children to add their ideas to a wall that they all could access at any time through a link placed within their Glow group. I initially asked the question, “Which features should we include in our newspaper?” This wall allowed the children to share their ideas, comment and add to them. It gave them an opportunity to give constructive feedback on each others suggestions. All comments made by the children needed to be approved by myself before they went live.

Poll Everywhere Example Blog Post — This is a screenshot of the poll we created as a class to decide the name of our newspaper.

My class decided they wanted to give our newspaper a name. We discussed suggestions and they decided they would each vote on their favourite. I asked the class if they had ever voted online or by text using their mobile phone? I heard a unanimous chorus of “Yes!” I wanted to encourage all pupils to vote for their favourite newspaper name. I decided create an online poll using polleverywhere.com. Poll Everywhere is a free service that allows the children to vote within a teacher generated poll using their mobile phones and voting by text or by completing a simple web response form. I first saw this learning tool in action during an input given by a very innovative lecturer, Sharon Tonner, at the University of Dundee. All the children appeared to be very enthusiastic about being able to vote – including the less motivated pupils who I was targeting this learning tool towards. I felt that if I had all my pupils fully engaged from the offset of the project, the finished product would be more rewarding for them. Overnight, I had a 100% response to the poll – all of the members of my class taking part in the project!

As the project progressed and publication date was nearing, the pupils used Comic Life and Textease to create draft copies of their feature stories. The boys in particular were very keen to write up their reports of the latest school team football match. Pupils who would struggle to stay on task during a writing lesson were fully engaged with Comic Life.

There is one pupil in particular who exhibits challenging behaviour within the class. She has excellent ICT skills. I decided to give her the chance to be the ICT Consultant in Chief. She excelled in this consultative role. She was focussed and willing to show to the rest of the class how to modify and produce their paper. She clearly explained how to create a drawing in Textease, save it and then import it into Comic Life.

As well as producing a physical copy of the OL Record (Our Lady’s Record), the pupils were very keen to release an electronic copy of the paper. We used youblisher.com to create an electronic version of our paper. We created pdf’s of each page and used the online program to create our paper.

The pupils were proud of their creation. They took great delight in handing them out to family and friends at their MacMillan Coffee Morning.

Matthew Monaghan, Primary 7 class teacher at Our Lady’s Primary, Dundee.

Featured, Global Citizenship, Glow, Languages, Other Big Stories, Second, Social Studies, Technologies

A Northern Irish Partnership

October 17, 2011 User deactivated 4 Comments

Click on this link to our video presentation.

My name is Matthew Monaghan and I am the Primary 7 class teacher at Our Lady’s Primary School in Dundee.

During my final year of the BEd at the University of Dundee I had the opportunity to take an elective in Global Learning. During one of the module inputs given by both Peter Wakefield and Brenda Keatch, it was stated, “citizenship starts at a local level. It starts with you and your class“. This struck a chord with me. I have strong links with St Anne’s Primary School in Derry, Northern Ireland. I attended this school as a child and I also had the chance to work with one of the Primary 6 classes during the final months of the last school year.

Teaching a Primary 7 class gave me the perfect opportunity to develop a partnership with the Primary 7s at St Anne’s. The aim of this partnership is to allow the children in both classes to share their learning experiences throughout their final year of primary school. With the help of Siobhan Gillen, one of the Primary 7 teachers at St Anne’s, each pupil at Our Lady’s has been linked with two ‘Learning Partners’ from St Anne’s (due to class numbers). The project is in its initial stages. I plan to add to this post to update on its progress.

Our Lady's Primary, Dundee — Bird's eye view of Our Lady's using Bing Maps

I introduced the partnership to a very eager class by using Google Street View and the Bird’s Eye option that is part of Bing Maps to explore both schools and both cities from above. We explored the locations in each country.

I feel an important aspect of this partnership is that it is pupil led. I try to act as a facilitator as much as possible. My class asked if we could set up a Glow group for our project. They asked if it would be possible for the pupils and teacher from St. Anne’s to be members of our Glow group.

Voki created by Our Lady's — A Voki of myself created by one of my pupils

After a lot of discussion about what the pupils wanted to find out about Ireland, the pupils decided that it would be a good idea to tell the pupils from St. Anne’s a little bit about themselves. A pupil from my class suggested writing letters and posting them. We did this intially. However, within my class there is a wide range of ability. I felt that to engage less able writers, a different tool was needed. I introduced my class to a Voki. After a quick demonstration on how to create a voki and how to obtain the code needed to embed each completed Voki in our Glow group, my class decided that they all wanted to create their own. They were very engaged. My class were keen for their Irish learning partners to view the voki created.

I felt if pupils had the chance to see each other in real time the learning experience would be enriched greatly. With support from Louise Henderson, we have begun to use the Adobe Connect component within our Glow group to video conference and share our learning experiences visually. Adobe Connect allows all pupils to take part in video based discussions using web cameras and headsets in both classrooms. So far both classes have participated in an introductory ‘Learning Conference’. We used the ‘discussion’ layout. The focus of this initial conference was to give the pupils a chance to get to know their learning partners a little better. As the project progresses the plan is for a video conference to take place every three weeks. Pupils from St Anne’s have been studying the Victorians. Pupils from my class will be focussing on the novel Matilda by Roald Dahl as a learning context.

Adobe Connect Screen Grab — Sharing a whiteboard in real time with both classes within Abobe Connect

During each conference pupils from both schools will share their learning journey through Primary 7 and follow an agreed agenda. We plan to use the different functions present within Adobe Connect including the sharing tab. This gives both classes the ability to use the ‘whiteboard’ pod. We will be able to create and share flipchart slides, text and free-hand drawings in real time allowing a variety of lessons to be viewed simultaneously in both Dundee and Derry. My pupils are very excited about this.

As well as using Glow as a virtual learning environment, we have also begun to use LearningNI, the VLE used by schools throughout Northern Ireland. Pupils have access to a course created within LearningNI. This gives both pupils and staff involved a chance to use two different platforms. Both ‘learning spaces’ allow pupils to share their progress. Initially, I felt it would be better to focus on one VLE. However, each has its own unique features and benefits. Pupils are able to contribute to discussion forums set up within their course in LearningNI and within their Glow group. They can view each others Voki. Pupils from St Anne’s have begun to upload PowerPoint presentations they have created based on the Victorians to our course within LearningNI. Pupils from Our Lady’s can peer assess their work, posting their comments to the workspace within LearningNI. We have also begun to do this within our Glow group.

Dan's Comment — One of the comments submitted by a pupil from St Anne's which was selected and published by the Newsdesk team within LearningNI.

Within LearningNI pupils can view current new stories within the Newsdesk section. These are edited by a member of The Guardian team. They also have the chance to submit comments which can be viewed and shared across Northern Ireland as part of the ‘Have Your Say’ section. During the October holidays I visited the Primary 7 class at St Anne’s to talk about our partnership. Four of the pupils from St Anne’s had their comments selected by the team from the Guardian and they were displayed online by the Newsdesk.

Glow Group Noticeboard — This is the header created using wix.com for our Glow Group

My pupils asked me if it was possible to make the design of our Glow group more eye-catching. We used wix.com to create web parts which we could fully edit and customise after creating a free account. We created headers for each area of our Glow group which we have been able to animate and add music to. We have added these to our glow group using the XML code generated.

This is a very exciting project in which the pupils from both schools are fully engaged. They are naturally curious about each others experiences during their final year of primary school. They are counting down the days to our next video discussion!

Early, Featured, First, Fourth, Glow, Other Big Stories, Parental Involvement, Second, Senior Phase, Technologies, Third

Blogging to enagage with Parents at Dens Road Primary School

September 16, 2011 Louise Henderson 1 Comment

Post written by Lorraine Munro, Dens Rd Primary School Dundee

Blogging with our class has helped me and my colleagues engage with parents in their children’s learning and the life of the school, and given an opportunity to consulate, communicate and open a dialogue with both learners and parents. I hope that by sharing our experiences, I’ll give you some ideas for starting your own class blogs.

I work in Primary One in Dens Road Primary School in Dundee, Scotland. Our Scottish Schools Digital Network, GLOW, introduced Glow Blogs and we decided to think about blogging as a way to engage parents. These are blogs based on WordPress. I wasn’t really familiar with blogs and wasn’t sure of their purpose, but we were really enthusiastic about trying to use them to engage parents with learning.

Parents in nursery (pre-school) usually have quite a lot of contact with staff, can ask about learning and see their child’s progress when they collect them. Moving into Primary One (ages 4 and 5) is slightly different. Parents tend to have limited contact and pick up and drop off at the school gate. Children are also notorious for answering ‘nothing’ when asked what they have been doing at school!

We embarked on using a blog to show parents the learning that was taking place in school and hopefully foster good home/school links. We called it Dens Road Primary One. At the beginning, we didn’t gain permissions from parents/carers as we only used images of areas or displays in the classroom. As this is a public facing blog, we knew that if we wanted to use images of children we would have to gain permission from parents/carers.

We started by sharing what our topic was and some of the areas of learning that children would have an opportunity to use during the school day. We also uploaded images of sound work that they were introduced to by the teachers and number work we were doing in the classroom. Here is an example of the type of images we used. These images were used when we were learning about growing and plants.

The blog posts were shared with the children every week and the children were encouraged to ask their parents to comment on the blog posts.

We put up some website links that children could access at home to support learning too.

The URL for the blog was printed on the bottom of our homework diary so parents were reminded where they could access it.

The comments that were made by parents were really encouraging. Here are some examples:

Chloe’s Mum – What fantastic sock puppets! Chloe is going to show her little brother Callum how she made hers this weekend so he can have one too! Keep up the good work primary 1.. Can’t wait to see what your up to next week!

Caseys mum – hi Casey really enjoyed Idris and had lots to tell me about him it is fun and interesting to look at the blog and see what Casey has been doing.

Donna (lee’s mum) – Hi, Really enjoying seeing all of the photo’s of the school. This blog is great. Look at it all the time. Enables me to see what Lee does at school. Keep up the good work. Thanks

kayleigh´s mum – I loved the caterpillar and the pictures.Thank you teachers for all your hard work . Kayleigh is so happy and everywhere we go she explains how wonderful her school is. When is the next party?

During snow week – when the school was closed for a week – we put up websites that the children could access and gave them ideas for having fun at home in the snow.

We put reminders up on to the blog about events in school, for example, as an extra way of keeping parents informed.

We also blogged with another P1 class, as our school was celebrating its 100-year birthday. The other school, St Andrew’s Primary School in Dundee, is a very new school. The children took photos of our school and I put them on the blog. They helped me write the blog post. The other school took pictures of their school. We looked at the photos and commented on the blog posts.

We used tags to build a word cloud of the popular posts and made it easy for people visiting the site to find areas that they were interested in.

We added a ClustrMap widget to the blog and we soon saw that it was getting lots of visits from around the world. This gave us an opportunity to share a totally different learning experience with the children.

We looked at the world map and discussed different countries names and where they were. We had some parents who had relatives abroad who were visiting the blog and children were able to discuss this in the classroom. We also looked at how many people were looking at our blog every day. Nearly 3500 visitors and we are still very popular!

Blogging in Primary One has been a great way to help engage with the parents of our pupils. Some things we will look at next include promoting the use of the local library for free Internet access and having drop-in sessions at the end of the school day as a way of reaching parents who don’t have Internet access so we are truly inclusive.

CfE Curriculum Area, Dundee Active Learning, First, Literacy, Other Big Stories, Second

Critical Reading Skills – Cracking the Case!

August 30, 2011 User deactivated Leave a comment

In August 2010 I was given responsibility for a P4/5 class. In reading, it became apparent that the majority of the children were able to decode words confidently and read aloud, however they needed support to meet the Curriculum for Excellence Reading outcomes connected with ‘understanding, analysing and evaluating’ (literacy outcomes 16 – 19). I decided to adapt a Reading Detective programme outlined by Dundee City Council and to use it as the basis for a programme in class. The programme defines various reading skills and attaches a detective role to each; the children are encouraged to become these detectives whilst examining texts in class and at home. I chose eight reading skills to focus on: Summariser, Word Finder, Question Master, Passage Master, Link Maker, Illuminator, Mind Mapper and Style Seeker.

My adapted program began with the children receiving a brown manila envelope with a CD inside it sent by the ‘Department of Crimes Against Literature’, a special police department set up within Dundee to fight the eight members of the B.A.D. (Books are Dull) Gang. The children completed enrolment forms for the Trainee Officer Scheme and thereafter, on a weekly basis, received a case file about a member of the gang and an appropriate ‘training mystery’ to solve in class. The children therefore experienced a different reading skill each week since each member of the B.A.D. Gang corresponded to a specific Detective role. Once they had completed all the tasks a graduation ceremony was held and each child was presented with a Detective Kit.

The children, however, found some of the skills harder than others, particularly the skills which involved looking at how a writer uses descriptive language to convey meanings and feelings (Style Seeker and Illuminator), so the following term was spent focussing on these skills through the context of fairytales. Fairytale characters and stories were under attack from the B.A.D. Gang and they sent messages to the children. They were ‘trained’ to spot true and fake ‘mixed up’ stories. I chose to focus on 6 ‘mixed up’ fairytale books including ‘The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs’ by Jon Scieszka and ‘Goldilocks Returns’ by Lisa Campbell Ernst and the children ‘examined’ these in mixed ability groups. I also worked in collaboration with staff from the Learning Resources department and the Schools Library Service, and arranged visits to two local libraries in the area which had just been ‘attacked’ by the B.A.D. Gang.

The children have become much more confident talking about, and using, the skills required when reading and will often apply these skills in different contexts and other curricular areas. They are also extremely enthusiastic about Reading Detective tasks and so I wanted to channel this energy into tackling longer texts which require greater concentration. This term we focussed on the works of Dick King Smith: farmers have been calling the department to say that they have been finding fields filled with torn up books by the author. Instead of sending home books from the school reading scheme, all the children read a Dick King Smith novel suitable for their level of reading. He was a prolific writer and wrote for a variety of reading abilities. The children were put in to small ‘book groups’ and they chose the book they would like to read and discuss. We may also visit the Central Library in Dundee, however it is all dependent upon what the B.A.D. Gang will get up to next!