"Hi Ho, Hi Ho..." etc, etc, etc...

Its that time of year again.  The day before teachers all over the UK return to the classroom for a fun-filled year of educating!  This is why I am currently avoiding the planning that I have allowed to build up and am writing a blog entry instead.  The ultimate in 'productive procrastination"...

I have, however, been through the resources on my computer and as there are over 14 years worth in there it has taken  substantial proportion of my time.  I just wanted to share a couple of my quick, go-to resources that are in my folder every September.

1. The first one is this poster. 'Three Before Me'.  We all want our students to be as independent as possible in their learning but with the ability to find out the information they need.  I loved this idea the moment I saw it and now this poster goes on my classroom door and and wall from the start of term. (I once made them all stick it in their workbooks just to really drive home the message, but the photocopying budget has since shrunk!)






2. Another resource I always have to hand for my early finishing historians is this set of critical thinking cards.  When I found these on Teachers Pay Teachers by 'Got to Teach' I knew my students would love them and so do I. They take so much of the stress of creating extension activities away.  Just get your early finisher to select a card with a question on it and they can use any text you like to answer it. Ingenious!
Critical Thinking Cards.

3. I don't know about you but I love using DBQs in my history classes. Source are the meat and drink of history and its these skills the students will need if they are to achieve the best they can in the subject.  To help them, a few years ago, I created these help cards. They give clear instructions on how to attempt a range of document based questions with sentence starters and success criteria. I laminated them and handed them out and I have never looked back.  My students keep them in a wallet in their folder and can refer to them at any time.  Its so heartwarming to see them being used without prompting. AND it supports the '3 before me' idea. Win - Win!




4. And finally so the kids can actually write their fantastic inferences and ideas down I make everyone
of them P.E.E.L!  My first lesson back with my classes wouldn't be complete if I don't hand these bad boys out and tell them all to stick them in their books.  Every have a POINT, EVIDENCE, EXPLANATION and LINK sentence forcing them rot explain and evaluate their arguments.  Great for those that have trouble when faced with a blank page as well as you higher achievers who sometimes miss out a stage and skip to the evaluation with out evidence. PEEL MAT


However you start your year,  I hope these ideas have been helpful and the very best of British luck to everyone heading on into school tomorrow. And if you have longer than that - I'm insanely jealous! ;0)

Time Travel and the jet-lagged mind...

I am writing this in the bathroom at 4am in the morning.  I have jetlag and don’t want to wake up The Mister or the baby so I’m killing time in here.  We’ve been travelling 23 hours but my brain won’t switch off and has taken me back to various childhood holidays and how we’d kill time then instead. 

When I was a child we spent a couple of weeks every summer at my Grandparents by the sea. They were what I’d call ‘Proper Grandparents’, in that they were old for as long as I can remember. There was no chldrens’ TV allowed and the set didn’t go on until the 6 o clock news while we ate our dinner.  But we went on drives in the country to see odd places with farm animals or rescued dogs, or spent days at the beach with Gran in a deckchair, and most importantly, as soon as we got there , my Gran always took us round to the library to get a temporary membership card.  I have no idea if public libraries still do this, but it was a brilliant idea. We could take out up to 8 books for a fortnight and in those books lay my escape from potential boredom!  My sister and I tried to learn ballroom dancing from a book with drawings of all the steps.  (As an avid follower of Strictly Come Dancing now, I don’t think our quickstep was particularly accurate but we had fun in the garden…)  and I learnt several magic tricks to wow my friends and I can still remember them now.

I was, however, primarily obsessed with ghosts and time travel.  In the library I made a beeline for anything with ‘ghost’ or ‘time’ in the title. And this is how I found two of my favourite children’s books of all time: ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ by Madeleine L’Engle and ‘The Ghosts’ by Antonia Barber.  

I loved them for a number of reasons, especially their explanations of space and time travel.  I had a bit of a hidden desire to be an astronaut when I was 8 and I think this played to that nicely.

In A Wrinkle in Time (1962), a clever and awkward girl must rescue her scientist father with the help of her young brother and friend as well as Mrs Who, Mrs Which and Mrs Whatsit.  It’s a great story about good versus evil and conformity but as I say, I was most interested in the space/time travel dimension of the book.  L’Engle  explains the use of  a Tesseract to cross through space.  L’Engle’s characters propose that the world is made up pf 5 dimensions, the 4^th being Time and the 5^th the dimension you travel through.  She described space as a kind of vast expanse of cloth. For an ant to crawl from one point to another would take an age. But if you ‘wrinkle’ the fabric, two distant points can come together.  This she called a Tessering.  Written in 1962 it was progressive for its time. Some of the maths is considered ‘wrong’ now but the concept of a Tesseract or hypercube has stood the test of time and research.  Either way, this book sparked a real interest in science, time and space for me and thousands of other kids and that can never be a bad thing! 

  

The Ghosts by Antonia Barber is a slightly different deal.  Set in the Edwardian period, two children go with their widowed mother to a derelict mansion house devastated by fire. She is to be the housekeeper.  A mysterious old gentleman named Mr Blunden arrived at their door in Camden and offered her the job personally, asking the children if they would be afraid if they saw a ghost... 

Not to give too much away, the two children have to travel in time to save the day. It’s all thrilling fun and adventure, but again the bit that always struck me was the way the author explained the time travel part.   In this book time is described as being like a wheel.  All points in time are therefore linked by the spools and, given the right circumstances, a person could travel along one to the centre of the wheel (where time is still like the eye of a tornado) and travel across to another time point on the wheel.   In my mind this made complete sense.  As a child I would try and concentrate really hard and see if I could separate my mind from my body and go back in time.  Needless to say it never worked. But again, it sparked my imagination and kept boredom at bay.  

Anyway, thats my rambling done for now.  I highly recommend you check out these books, if not for you then for your kids or your classes.   So thanks Gran and Grampy for switching the telly off and making us read!

Right - I'm off to find something else to read...