Making Books

I have been thinking of ways to continue with some literacy learning - especially letter sound knowledge and basic sight words for my 5 year old son for over the summer break...so have been looking at ideas of making our own books!
making books - has both topic ideas, format suggestions, links for teacher and for family as well as ideas for illustrations and binding
Felt or fabric books - using the child's name with say E is for egg, t is for tent, h is for house....
how to write a children's story


and some online books - a little unfortunate that the American's spell mum in a funny way!
Lil Fingers

hopefully find some more soon!

Literacy & ICT finds

ICT in English blog
Literacy Learning Progressions
Why let students blog?
Rachel Boyd - interesting ICT ideas

more numeracy

maths recovery
count me in too
Teaching number in the class with 4-8 year olds

grid paper

lots of different grid patterns....you can change the spacings and line colours too.

Toi Maori

Looking at some Maori Art or Toi Maori with Year 3's this week.

Idea is to explore some Maori art to later use for signs around the school to remind us of ways to keep Queenstown Primary 'Beautiful'. Part of the 'how to' for the class is 'how to keep our School Beautiful'.

Toi Maori
New Zealand Maori Art
Maori Design\

Bloom-ing

Inquiry Learning Ideas
Blooms Taxonomy
De Bono's Thinking Hats
Higher Order Thinking
applying Bloom's Taxonomy
Revised Taxonomy

Dunedin maths Trip

A useful link:
Otepoti - a Dunedin based page with lots of useful links on

Inspiring and Informative trip to explore numeracy in some other schools.
Gained lots of ideas for independent activities (as shown in the collage above) and ways to make maths more visible in the classroom.
Interested to not see children using computers during numeracy lessons.
Interested also to note that both schools visited keep literacy and numeracy 'pure' and keep topic or inquiry for the afternoons.
One school also not willing to 'join' prescribed teaching programmes including PMP and Sounds Alive with reasons including knowing individual children's needs and focussing on those rather than having 'all' children doing them whether needed or not.

How To...

hmmm, inquiry topic for middle school in Term 4 is 'how to....' the class will be doing science experiments on other days... I now need to think of something for Wed & Thur afternoons.

but here's some links I want to save for reference...

Pop up Cards (with instructions)
'V' stand - ways to hold the pop ups up!
Pop up card designer - a windows application
enchanted learning - lots of pop ups with good instructions
pop up card instructions - with video!

maybe 'how to make pop up cards & books'?
how to create dimension with paper?
???

Sparkle Box

Sparkle Box

Te Reo

Maori Numbers - interactive page, also looks at money & phone numbers
NZ invertebrate in Maori
Maori Dictionary

Learning Te Reo
Korero Maori - for learners
100 Maori words every NZ'r should know
Maori Language Net

Teacher Resources
Lesson Plans

Maori Language Strategy Audit

Apparently

it's conservation week!

The middle school had talks about Reduce, Reuse and Recycle last week. Cool. I saw some 'desk tidy's' being created - by reusing some tins and boxes... interested to see lots of purchased embellies for these & they were stored in little plastic bags. hmmm. I wonder if something could be created that reuses everything on it except the adhesive perhaps?

Re-use -practical ways to re-use waste at home
Reuse old bags - paper & plastic
Creative ways to use reuse disposable items
Re-using drink bottles
5 ways to re-use newspaper


some other interesting places:
zero waste
zero waste schools
sustainability

Fonts

Some great classroom fonts can be found here!

getting back into the primary classroom

A teaching resource blog!