Teaching Tips: ABC does

Hello Bloggers!

My teacher has been so helpful with giving me tips and advice so that I can become the best teacher possible. As a result she told me to read up on objective led planning on abc does. It's a blog written by an ex-headteacher. I love blogs like this as they are real experiences coming from someone who has been in the game long enough to have seen the vast changes made to education over the years. After reading these posts I have found so many new ideas I want to try as well as helping me understand objective led planning. I can't express how much I love this idea. It allows me to take the learning to the children in provision differentiating the activities they're engaged in, without them even realising. It doesn't involve pulling the children from provision to a table. This makes learning fun for children instead of being a task they hate doing!

Reading blogs and articles such as abc does allows me to feel positive about going into my own classroom in the future. I'm really excited to put these ideas into practice because I want to see the results for myself. If anyone is struggling like I do sometimes, with EYFS then reading up on blogs such as this one really reassures you! They give you so many ideas and tips to try. It's trial and error and I can't say every idea will work as every class is different!

Please read up on this blog if you have some spare time it really is a good read! Also if you have any good teaching tips/ideas please share them below! Would be lovely to see us help each other!

ABC Does blog: http://www.abcdoes.com

"The rest is still unwritten"

Megan 

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Teaching Tips: Hattie Peck by Emma Levey

Hello Bloggers!

As I mentioned in yesterday's post I've been buying lots of books today and as it's Easter time I thought it would be pretty good to add this little book to my collection. Hattie Peck cost me £1.49 at Sainsburys! Not bad at all and the children in my Reception class loved it. 

The story is about a chicken called Hattie who loves eggs. All she wants is an egg of her own so she leaves her coop to go on an adventure to collect all the abandoned eggs in the world. It's a really nice story because at a young age children are aware that chickens lay eggs and chicks hatch out of them. As a result of this errors and misconceptions can occur, e.g. that every animal that hatches from an egg is a chick. This is not true and this book shows that when Hattie collects all the eggs and they hatch there are a lot of different animals. It's nice to show children how many animals hatch from eggs and that they can grow to be a lot larger than chickens! 

When I got to the last page I just asked the children "What has happened?" and they all sat up and stared at the picture. They were confused. "They're not chickens!" It was nice to sit and chat about the different animals Hattie had found and where she'd collected their egg from. This definitely interested the children as some of these animals were quite large and seeing them come from an egg so small confused them. 

Overall, I think this is such a lovely book to share with children. The pictures are bright and colourful and the text is in different fonts and not written in straight lines. It's nice for children to be exposed to different fonts and not the usual boring child friendly font that they're used to seeing. If you're in Sainsburys and looking for a new book to pick up on the trip definitely pick this one up from the shelf!

"The rest is still unwritten"

Megan 

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Teaching Tips: Ice Experiment

Hello Teachers!

Last year I was on my first teaching placement for my University course. Even though I had spent time in classrooms a lot the idea was so scary and daunting. I was placed in a Year 2 class and one of my observations had to be a Science lesson. Now I've never planned my own lesson before and I had to fit in with what the children were already studying. The topic was 'Fire and Ice', however my focus was on 'Ice'. Obviously, I picked to do a melting ice experiment.

'Save The Penguin' Experiment

The children were learning about animals in Antarctica and their favourite was the Penguins. I decided to freeze a picture of a penguin (which had been laminated) using the 6 paint palette trays. The ice cubes were a lot bigger for the children to see them melt and when they saved the penguin they could take him/her home.

We used 5 different materials to test melting these ice cubes. I used Sugar, Table Salt, Road Salt, Pepper and Sand. Due to the size of the ice cubes I had made up some word searches which focused on getting the children to find our key words. This allowed them to stay on task and wait to see which one melted the fastest.

I did this in table groups, 5 to a table. Each child on that table had a bowl and an ice cube and they each had a different material. This allowed everyone to be involved and in charge of something.

This experiment was done in Summer which was the worst time to do it in. It was good to talk about the misconceptions children had, as some thought pepper/sand was best to use, however this had melted faster because of the temperature. This was introducing the children to the idea of how some factors can affect our experiments and give us wrong results (anomalies).

The children loved this experiment and I would say it was a success. Of course like every lesson there would be somethings I would do differently. The most important thing is to keep children engaged and the best way to do this is to do practical work where possible. Children in Early Years and KS1 love being active and involved. This ice experiment was allowing children to explore and see what they found. We could then discuss the table results as a class and talk through the problems we faced e.g. the affect the temperature had on the ice cubes.

It was really nice to see some children had taken their penguins home and made bigger ice cubes and tried to melt them. We discussed in the morning how bigger ice cubes would take longer to melt than the size we had in the lesson.

Do you have any ice experiments that worked well with your children?

"The rest is still unwritten"

Megan