Explore the world from your whiteboard!

http://learn.christianaid.org.uk/globalexplorerswhiteboard/index.html

Global Explorers is a fantastic, interactive whiteboard resource for primary schools.
It features fascinating facts, quizzes, video footage, photos, lesson plans, worksheets and the real-life stories of children all over the world.

This resource is ideal for cross-curricular teaching. It encourages active learning and stimulates thinking about global issues.

Global Explorers covers the following themes:
water
climate change
comparing lives
active citizenship
disasters
access to food
healthy eating
what influences how Christian people act
the work of a faith-based charity

The BBC's Stay Safe site explains to children how you stay safe on the Internet and also has links to other sites which promote safety and well being for children such as childline.

This site could be a useful starter for a scheme of work about using the Internet.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/help//web/staysafe/

Teaching ICT

This site is dedicated to teaching ICT at all levels. Students will find revision notes to learn your ICT subject along with plenty of quizzes, competitions, polls to keep things interesting. Teachers will find starters and plenaries along with Schemes of Work ( SoW) , lesson ideas and tons of free material. Revision resources for every level are available.

I particularly like the video tutorials section! View at: http://www.teach-ict.com/index.html

Just for Fun!

This Dutch website is great to share with your class! It takes a while to load but it will be worth the wait and I'm sure that you'll be surprised!

http://producten.hema.nl/

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/teachingtools/teachingtools.html

Lots of useful teacher stuff! Including hundreds of good quality classroom resources.

Here is one of my Egyptian displays, focusing on using non-fiction books - key words were obtained from http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/

Writing Fun!

http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/jeather/writingfun/writingfun.html

This site is great for all aspects of writing as it gives children the structure they need in order to write in a particular genre. I'd actually forgotten about it until I was looking around for something to blog today! I was a bit miffed as I thought of lots of occasions this year where I could have used it!
For a report, for example, there is information about all the things you need to remember as well as 6 examples of work, ranging from year 2/3 standard up to year 6/7 standard.

Film Street

Film Street - Everything you need to help and inspire you to use film in your classroom! This of course fits in very nicely with the Primary Framework!

http://www.filmstreet.co.uk/default.aspa

There are lots of activities for children to do to find out more about how films are made. In my year group we planned a unit of work on Wall-E and the information and activities on the website really helped my class gain a better understanding of how films are put together.

Needless to say, they were very motivated and produced some fantastic work that week!

Other areas on the website include an area for teachers, news about current films and useful information on different film genre such as making a documentary.

Speaks for itself really! http://www.worksheetworks.com/

Scratch - Free animation and control software!!

I have been having so much fun with this! I was introduced to it at an ICT subject coordinators meeting in Essex and I've just Incorporated it into our ICT planning for year 5.

The website says: Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.
Scratch is available free of charge!

go to: http://scratch.mit.edu/ for the main site

http://scratch.mit.edu/download to download

http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Support for support which includes

video guides, activities for children and a getting started guide.

Here is an example of one of the 10 pdf documents you can download for use with the children. My class are loving it! They can download the program at home and make their own animations to upload to the scratch website. You can also download any animations already on the website that link with current topics that you are studying.

Assemblies Website

This assemblies website is great for assemblies throughout the year for all year groups. They are also very fast at adding assemblies about recent events. http://www.assemblies.org.uk/

A caption competition is always a good starter activity which promotes thinking skills as well as developing subtle humour!

Simply find a funny picture for children to think of a caption for, this activity works best with years 5 and 6.

It's report writing time again!

I always use report assist which you can download for free at: www.rayslearning.com

It helps by allowing you to create your own comment banks and you can tell it the child's name and if they are a boy or a girl so it fits all the hims and hers in the correct places!

There are also sample comment banks to download.

Don't forget to back up your reports! It is probably on the to do list but get it done because I suffered 'blue screen of death' on my laptop and nearly lost the lot today. Luckily I have a technical friend who after a few nail biting hours, managed to recover them! Hindsight is wonderful, now they are backed up in several places.