Tag Archives: Dens Road Primary

All Posts, Dundee Active Learning, Early, Featured, First, Health and Wellbeing, Health Promoting, Literacy, Numeracy, Other Big Stories, Technologies

Gaming as a Context for Early Years Learning

1 Comment

Post written by Lorraine Munro

I’m an Early Years Practitioner in a Primary One (ages 4 and 5) class in Dundee, Scotland. I am also a Promethean Advocate. As a previous ICT Staff Tutor, I was interested in using gaming as a hook to engage young children with all aspects of learning. We often loaned out gaming resources to schools and early years establishments as part of an initiative to support learning in the classroom through Curriculum for Excellence, Scotland’s curriculum for 3–18 year olds. The Learning Teaching Scotland website has a dedicated area to game based learning.

When I returned to school after the summer break, I was really excited to put my experiences into practice. In the last school year, we have used a variety of consoles and games to support our youngsters in their learning. This is our journey through the year…

Writing Using the Nintento DS

We began by using two Nintento DS’ at the writing table. I introduced Pictochat to the children and they practised writing sounds and letters they had been taught by the teacher. They also liked to practise writing their name and it was a great way to encourage emergent writing. They enjoyed ‘sending’ their writing to each other and this activity was a real winner with the boys. They had no problem with the small stylus and, in fact, this really helped with pencil control.

We have approximately ten Nintendo DS’ and are using them across the school. It has been embraced and other classes have used them in different areas:

  • Support for Learning has used them to support spelling
  • Classes further up the school have used them with the Brain Training game
  • An upper school class is about to embark on using them with Professor Leyton to support literacy and problem solving

Learning with Games Consoles

In Primary One, we then moved on to using the Playstation 2 with the Eye Toy. We used the game Play. I would give the children clear instructions on what game was to be played and the children would very quickly pick up the on-screen instructions. The area surrounding the game was set up to support number recognition and I would encourage the children to find their score on the number square. We also looked at Health and Wellbeing outcomes like sharing space, being aware of rules and turn taking.

We were lucky to buy gaming equipment for the school and purchased a Wii and Xbox with Kinect. Primary One children were allowed to try out the Wii and as we were doing a Health topic, we decided on FIT, which is a Dora and Diego game. Although this game is for one player, we had up to four children taking part at any time. One person held the Wii remote but all four children did the activities. Children won medals when they completed a routine so we decided to take this opportunity to support maths and every time the children won a medal they added it to our graph.

We also used the Wii game Just Dance as a whole class activity during our health week. We had four Wii remotes and everyone had a turn to hold the Wii remote and gain a score. This game was a huge success and is now one of our whole school Friday activities.

The next game we used was Yogi Bear. The children were engrossed in a Goldilocks and the Three Bears topic and I was looking at bears in my area. This game was less active, but we adapted the area to look more like Jellystone Park and although this was also a one player game we had two children participating at any time. This meant there was also a peer there to encourage and support when necessary. We moved the writing table beside the Wii area and this encouraged the boys to write and draw about their experiences with the game. Near the end of the topic, we had a Yogi Bear book. The children recorded their experiences of using the game in the book by drawing a picture and writing. Some asked me to scribe for them while others felt confident enough to have a go themselves.

Managing the Logistics

We encountered a few difficulties using the Wii as it was a very popular activity and was very much in demand. This meant that not all the children were getting an opportunity to use the game, as some were always there fast and some would stay on for a while. We devised a simple laminated sheet of all the children’s names and a whiteboard pen. I scored off the name when a child picked the Wii and they weren’t allowed to go back on until everyone had a turn. Once all the names were scored off, we cleaned the name board and we could start again. We also had a ten-minute timer so the children were responsible for setting this when they began the game. We also discussed rules for the game with the children and displayed them. We reminded children of these rules regularly and these complimented our Health and Wellbeing lesson plan within our curriculum

 

As a school we had also purchased X Box Kinect with Kinectimals. As we had an Animals topic near the end of the school year, we thought this would engage our youngsters and give opportunities for lots of discussion about animals. It did, but also supported all areas of the curriculum. We had to look at a number of different elements to make this work for us.

The area needed to be big enough so the child using the Kinect could be found by the sensor, but we didn’t want children to be using this in isolation from others. This meant we also had to fit in some kind of seating for other children to watch, discuss and support their peer through the game without them also being picked up by the sensor.

At first, using our previous gaming organisation ideas, we all had a turn at interacting with and getting to know the different cubs. We then voted using ActivExpressions about which one would be the P1 cub. We then chose the cub, which was the Black Panther cub and then proceeded into the game. The children taught the cub tricks and played games with it. They supported each other in performing the activities and carrying out the tricks. Lots of different curricular areas were supported, from maths when one child read his score of 295 and others read instructions on the screen hitting literacy outcomes. Experience was gained in Health and Wellbeing outcomes when children showed how they led and supported the learning of others and showed genuine care and understanding in caring for the cub. Overall, this game had a huge learning potential. It is not as easy to use an early years setting as the Wii, but it was well worth the effort.

Working with Pre-School Children

Our latest piece of work with the Wii has come from our transition with our nursery children (up to age 4) moving into Primary One. The nursery children had used the Mii Channel on the Wii console to create Miis for all the children as part of a topic about themselves. This allowed each child to create a Mii with their hair colour, eye colour, face shape and even find the letters in their name. When the children moved into P1, the Wii console came with them. The children have been using the Wii Sports game and bowling. This has given me an opportunity to create Miis for all the children who came to our school not from our nursery. It has also meant that the children can find their Mii when playing the bowling game. Furthermore, this game allows me to observe children who can read numbers to ten and begin early addition.

Our experiences with gaming are still developing and we are always looking for ways to engage our young people. Our latest purchase has been an iPad and we look forward to how we can support our children through their learning in new and innovative ways.

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

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.

All Posts, CfE Curriculum Area, Curricular Level, Dundee Active Learning, Early, Expressive Arts, Featured, First, Health and Wellbeing, Health Promoting, Literacy, Other, Other Big Stories, Technologies, Transition

Interactive White Boards in Early Years

Leave a comment

I have recently been lucky enough to have been given a Promethean Board to use in the Active Learning Zone area I work in. The children in P1 are well used to using the board in the classrooms with the teacher but I needed them to use the board with little or no adult support. The youngsters know how to calibrate the board so I was confident they could do this with support from their fellow pupils if necessary.

I decided to allow the children to use the Active Inspire software and just let them play with it. They drew pictures, wrote their names, changed colours, pen size and drew shapes. The only support I gave was to show them how to do something if they asked, eg. How do I get a new page? How do I change the background colour? Children choose the Promethean Board as an activity and up to three can go there at once although only one can use the board at a time. The children watch patiently and give instructions and help to the person on the Promethean Board when needed.

We have moved on to drawing with a purpose. A recent health topic looked at the different parts of our faces. I had a display next to the Promethean Board to remind them of the different parts of the face and gave instructions that the activity on the Promethean Board today was ‘drawing your own face’. I also left a mirror for them to check how they looked so they could copy. The children were asked to write their name on the flipchart page before they finished. Here are some of the pictures they drew.

The children have become really confident with the Active Inspire software and really enjoy creating and sharing their creations with each other and on their P1 blog. We also print off some of their activities do keep in their individual Folio of Work which is a reflection of their time in P1 which they can share with their parents. The children have become confident individuals who can share their learning with others.

Lorraine Munro, READ Early Years Practitioner, Dens Road Primary School, Dundee.