I am MisterJim

I set up a Linoit page on my class blog, asking for the children to come up with things they wanted to learn about in the upcoming weeks. I must admit, I expected the ideas to be a bit naff, like "Let's build a rocket and fly to the Moon for lunch." etc. How wrong I was. Here are some examples of the ideas they came up with: I was so impressed with the quality of the ideas that they had, that this Wednesday afternoon, we are going to pick the best ideas and put them into the topic for this term.  Power to the People. 

I was looking for inspiration for my class blog. One of the children had written a story and I posted on twitter. Richard, a boy in my class who was 'allergic' to writing in detail, had posted a story off his own back and was developing his own style. I wanted to share this - for him. He isn't the most confident of children and I knew that if he felt that he was valued as an author, it would encourage him to write more. I didn't expect 13 comments. The response was overwhelming and it got me thinking. We should do this more as a class, but I only know a few blogs made by other schools. So I tweeted again, using a hashtag of #classlinkup to encourage other teachers to share their blog addresses and therefore provide a comprehensive list of blogging schools for everyone to use. This was taken up by a lot of people, who added their own class blogs to the list. Evolution. Then a chance comment by Oliver Quinlan @oliverquinlan  got me thinking. I...

Photostory + children = chaos A few weeks ago at TeachMeet Yorks & Humber 2010, I presented on how effective Photostory had been when used by Key Stage 2 children (7-11yrs). Ever the optimist, I decided that I would attempt to use photostory with my class (5-6yrs old). On top of this, I thought, I know, let’s link up with a year 1 class in a different school, switch children so we’ve got half each. Design, plan build and watch the photostories – all in 50 minutes. The work was aimed to fit in with our literacy unit of information texts, and hit various other curriculum areas such as PHSE (teamwork & collaboration), Geography (locations), Speaking & Listening and others besides. Children were to organise pictures of their school into a storyboard, looking at including either key words, a phrase or a sentence for each one. Children worked in groups of 3 to collaboratively create a photostory. The theory behind this was to incorporate discussion & compromise into the act...