Ponderings and Musings

Today I had a chat with Peter Richardson about the use of Playbooks at his school and also his use of symbaloo to support the school website and the VLE element of it. I have had a play with it today and am testing the embedding tool. My next job is to sort out the sizing [...]

In my new post I am working with our teachers on developing our curriculum and am trying to use this (and other blogs) as a mine of information. We are presently looking at our teaching of reading and creating an atmosphere in which children see reading as pleasure as something which is a natural part [...]

I have completed my first week as a Primary Head Teacher and I am already beginning to understand the enormity of the role both in workload and importance. I am incredibly fortunate in the fact that the previous Head had given me a huge amount of support and access in support of transition and so [...]

I have been playing with the site today and have tried to make it easier to find old posts from over the last three years which might be lost over time. Going through the site I have come to the conclusion  that my posts fell into three main areas – curriculum ideas, reading and general [...]

I have been working with some teachers recently looking at supporting them in their planning for forthcoming topics. I have decided to extend this work to develop a slightly more cross curricular set of links to resources and web links although as ever the main thrust will be Literacy and ICT but I have sought [...]

I was speaking at a CPD session and chatted with a teacher about her forthcoming topic which she was calling “Space – the final frontier” which she was going to work on with her mixed Year Five and Six class. I put a few ideas together whilst we were chatting and made a request on [...]

On Friday, just hours before the Olympic ceremony demonstrated the qualities and strengths of Great Britain, the DfE announced that they had changed the rules for the appointment of teachers so that academy schools can hire unqualified teachers. The immediate kneejerk reaction to what is often kiteflying by Michael Gove, Nick Gibbs or the mandarins [...]

I was working with a teacher today preparing a sequence of work on data handling. We were keen to develop a sequence which got the pupils (who are working between 3A and 5C) talking about and interpreting the data. We were not looking to avoid data collection and graph drawing entirely but the emphasis is [...]

As so many schools are covering the Olympics and Greeks this term I have been playing with an old idea to support literacy work. I was a great fan, many years ago, of the Fighting Fantasy books and have enjoyed working with pupils on developing choice driven stories. I have developed a story in PowerPoint so [...]

  As someone who has worked for years trying to make the teaching of writing as engaging as possible, I have been fascinated looking at work taking place around the globe looking to bring gamification to the classroom. Reading the engaming blog has a this from  Deterding, Dixon, Khaled and Nacke  who define gamification as “the use of [...]