This blog has now moved to www.lordlit.com

 

Please join me there!!!

On Thursday 6th January I will be hosting the first #UKEDCHAT discussion of 2011. I asked Colin Hill (@Colport) if it would be acceptable to forego the traditional poll and set a question to be discussed.

Colin agreed and so we will be discussing the question  “In the current climate should schools be seeking to promote collaborative in-school CPD instead of external courses?”

This is not intended to be an attack on those companies who are lining up to provide a wider range of CPD for schools in the absence of organisations such as the National Strategies, QCDA and BECTA as well as the restriction in budgets for other organisations. It was selected as I am interested in how prepared colleagues are for the new world of education with what knowledge we have of how it will be.

I am not seeking to define which approaches to CPD schools should take or which forms of in school collaborative classroom-based CPD are the most effective however to aid discussion I have provided a series of links to information on different forms of CCCPD.

This is all in the context of the White Paper

Page 73
7.4. Our aim should be to create a school system which is more effectively self-improving. The introduction of new providers to the system, and the ability of parents, teachers and others to establish new schools is an important part of this, in bringing innovation and galvanising others to improve, especially in areas where parents are significantly dissatisfied. It is also important that we design the
system in a way which allows the most effective practice to spread more quickly and the best schools and leaders to take greater responsibility and extend their reach.

7.5 We will:
● Make clear that schools have responsibility for improvement. We will end the approach of trying to control improvement from the centre and make it easier for schools to learn from one another.
● Make sure that every school has access to the support it needs throughNational and Local Leaders of Education, Teaching Schools and leading teachers, or by working in partnership with a strong school.
● Encourage local authorities and schools to bring forward applications to the new Education Endowment Fund – funding for innovative projects to drive school improvement and to raise the attainment of deprived children in underperforming schools – and create a new collaboration incentive.
● Make sure that schools have access to evidence on best practice, high-quality materials and improvement services which they can choose to use.
● Support underperforming schools such as those below the new floor standards, and ensure that those which are seriously failing, or unable to improve their results, are transformed through conversion to Academy status.

Lesson Study

Teachers TV video extract on using lesson study to improve writing.

Improving practice and progression through Lesson Study (Document for Primary school leaders)

Coaching and mentoring

Teachers TVvideo extract on active observation as part of coaching and mentoring in a secondary setting

The difference between coaching and mentoring

Research

The impact of collaborative CPD in the classroom (Research  commisioned by the GTC for England)

A Happy New Year to all of my regular visitors and any newcomers to my blog. It will be a year which, I suspect, will see a change in the style and tone of my postings.

So here we are into the second decade of the 21st century and a time of real change within English education and within my professional life which means that I do need to thnk very carefully about where I hope to be in a year’s time.

I approach the end of my contract at the end of March which means that I am potentially going to be redundant for the first time since coming out of university in the early 1990s. This could be lead to interesting times in the Summer as I am actively seeking a Headship and this is likely to lead to an appointment for September. I am determined to see this as nothing other than an opportunity and have registered myself for Supply cover, applied to support LA interim support in school and have started looking at how I can use some of my skills on a consultancy basis in this period in between employment.

In addition to all of this we find ourselves in the national position where the White Paper has been released but the true implications and depth of policy has not become apparent. This will become clearer over the year particularly in terms of the new Primary curriculum, the teaching of phonics, funding for schools in the light of the Pupil Premium, Academisation and the use of technology in Primary.

So it is in this context that I set my goals for 2011.

1) In 2010 I set about addressing years of being overweight and lost over just under four stone to get to 15 stone. This year I will maintain  my weight at 14 1/2 stones.  I am hoping that a return to school will aid this as I lost 6 pounds in the first week the last time I moved from advisory work to teaching!

2) Blogging – I am determined to become more consistent in my blogging on this site. I am slightly restricted in some of the things I post as, at present, I steer clear of discussing policy on this site and so it can sometimes become a bit of a collection of tips for teachers. That said, the blog posts on Space, the Second World War and booklists are highly popular. I hope to continue developing posts based around a theme and have decided to set up a posterous account for a 365 project based around a different book every day.

3)  Reading – over the last few years I have developed a wonderful addiction to reading quality children’s books and hope to continue this over the next 12 months particularly with some wonderful news books on the edge of release.

4) Use of Web 2.0 – I have gained so much from my personal use of Web 2.0 applications over the last year and in particular through my involvement with the @giraffeclass project and the use of Voicethread as part of national training back in January. I will seek to use Web 2.0 applications in my new school to benefit children’s learning. I will also seek to support my own children at home to use them to aid their work and homework.

5) Athletics – In 2010 I took the unusual step of joining my children’s athletics club and taking part in several matches in Veteran throwing events – I am going to try to become the longest throwing in my division of over 40s in hammer and shotput this year. Although this will be aided by the fact that the holder for the last ten years has moved up to the over 50s! I love taking part in veteran throwing events as I accepted already as part of the gang and they are very forgiving of my inadequacies. It is also important for me to continue to put myself in a position of learning and out of my comfort zone.

6) Networking – 2010 has been my second year of tweeting and through it I have met some wonderful people both virtually and in person. In August my wife and I managed to break both of our cars a week before going on holiday. Amazingly two people who I only knew through Twitter made the offer of loaning me their car to ensure that we were still able to go. As well as this I have met with people to plan work,  have attended Teachmeets, have spoken at events as a result of discussions on Twitter and have found inspiration from people doing amazing things. In 2011 I will seek to be as useful to others as my PLN has been to me.

7)  Still have the dog by my side – on top of family one of the constants has been my dog who will often sit on my lap during office time. He is a source of great joy and I just hope as he enters his 14th year that he continues to be at my side during my adventures.

It will be interesting to see what this year brings.

Bill

In the last twenty four hours the government has announced that they will no longer be funding the charity Booktrust for its bookgifting schemes which promote reading by providing free books to children in England.

The schemes which will lose funding are:

• Bookstart, under which every baby in the UK receives a free pack of books – programmes in England will be affected
• Booktime, which provides further packs for children as they start primary school
• Booked Up, which enables all year 7 pupils in England to choose a free book.

You can read reports on the cuts from the BBC here and The Guardian here.

This appears to be a very cynical decision as there aren’t many babies, 3 and 7 year olds who will remember this when they are old enough to vote. It is one of those cuts which doesn’t get much publicity and which civil servants try to hide. I posted about it on a non educational forum I frequent and the reaction varied between anger through “It’s all Gordon Brown’s fault” to “It’s very sad but something has to be cut”. On a wider angle the reaction has included Former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen who said that he was “absolutely appalled and utterly enraged” by the news.

Alan Gibbons – a wonderful author and campaigner for library services wrote a fantastic blog post on this yesterday.  A quote which sticks with me is one he cites from Michael Rosen “Reading for pleasure can easily sound like some kind of wishy-washy, soft option, while instructional stuff like learning-to-read through ‘synthetic phonics’ and endless worksheets requiring children to answer questions about the facts in short passages, sound to some tough and purposeful. In actual fact, as the PIRLS research of 2006 has shown, children who read for pleasure achieve better school performance than those that don’t.”

I am urgently trying to find the UNESCO report which states that the one thing which unites all successful world leaders, businessmen is the fact that they were all voracious readers for pleasure. If I look at most of my friends they are people who read for interest and for pleasure and this gives us a different perspective on life. It simply appears to me that it is a selfish act for those who are able to read and to provide a literate environment for their own children to pull up the drawbridge to the magical kingdom of reading to those who are not from similar backgrounds.

It is our duty to hold a magnifying glass up to this decision which is to remove funding of £13 million at a time when other areas are being maintained and our country has agreed to bailout the Irish nation. The argument for this was that by supporting the Irish we would secure a better future for our citizens. Surely we are risking the future of our children if we do not invest their love of literature and this is exactly what the Book Trust funding for Book Giving ensures.

I work with schools where children do not see a book when they are at home and are not surrounded by the wonders of text. We could sit back and insist that it is the responsibility of the parents to provide this or we could fight these cuts and try to break the cycle in these families. On a financial basis surely it is better to support children to become readers from the youngest age than to have to invest in expensive intervention for children who are falling behind. Taking this one step further one only has to look at the correlation between low reading age and prison records – recently it was claimed that 85% of the male adult prison population has a reading ability commensurate with a Level 1A (an average ability 6 year old child) – if this is true then surely investing in something like Book giving is a sensible economic decision irrespective of one’s views on reading.

I emailed Alan Gibbons this morning to inform him of the #ukedchat tonight about the cuts – this was organised only this morning directly in response to news of the decision and to allow people on Twitter to discuss it and to think about how they could support the campaign to fight it. Alan is a literary hero of mine and it was wonderful to receive his response.  He urges people now to write to the media and to their MPs.

It is clear from the way in which in the cuts have been reported show that the Schools Sports Partnership campaigners had the advantage of the forthcoming Olympics to provide the embarrassment factor which means that we will need to work even harder to get our message across. If Michael Gove believes that knowing poetry is like having an iPod in your head and that all schools should immerse children in great literature then it is up to us to persuade him that he is robbing children of the opportunity to learn the power of literature about which he talks so eloquently.

Please spread the word that we need as many expressions of dismay in the media and with elected representatives as possible.

CC Malenkov in Exile

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 Twitter to my PLN.

The idea of the plans is to give the teacher resources to deliver a cross curricular topic which is an extension of the traditional earth, moon and sun topic. I have sought to provide a mixture of texts, quality films, websites which can develop an exploration of space with a less traditional approach.

Books
My first suggestion for a text is the wonderful M.P. Robertson’s ‘Seven Ways to catch the Moon‘ in which a young girl tries to catch the moon using tactics such as riding a shooting star. We suggested that the book could be used as a stimulus for Design Technology work which could be a stimulus for talk and writing. The children could design and build their own ways of catching the moon (this could be extended to testing them out if all of the models were built to the same scale.)

Other books which could be used are:
The Sea of Tranquility which is written by Mark Haddon (author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time) and illustrated by the incredible artist, Christian Birmingham (who has also produced illustrations of Wombat goes Walkabout, Windhover and other books).

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel which is actually the fantasy story of an airship which is hijacked by pirates. Although not about space travel it would work wonderfully as an ongoing text to be read to the class for pleasure and could be combined with Airman by Eoin Colfer.

Films to use

I thought of two short films to use which could be used to fire up the topic firstly the BFI film Baboon on the Moon the animated film by Christophe Duriez which is available on the collection of films to be used in the class, Starting Stories. It is available from the BFI education department but may be a little young for some classes. Details here.

My other suggestion is the lovely film, Rocketman,

which starts with a little girl opening up her favourite pop-up book and then moves into an animation which brings it to life. Again this book could be used as a direct stimulus for literacy but could also lead to exciting cross curricular work including building pop up books, making stop animation films or developing diagetic and non diagetic sound to accompany the film.

One of my Twitter PLN Carl James made the excellent suggestion of using Star Wars as a way into the topic and to fire children up. He wondered whether it would be better to use the animated version Clone Wars. Personally I think that this is an excellent idea as they are well constructed stories as well as being visually engaging.

It did occur to me that another possibility could be The Lego Star Wars animations. Lego is a wonderful construction system which could engage reluctant learners. Lego Star Wars

Twitter

NASA Education website

Next I thought about other ways of engaging young learners and remembered some I did a few years ago using the education section of the NASA website. There are some excellent resources which we used including their resources supporting work on the Moon and Mars.

I then received a tweet from Neil Adam reminding of the twitter streams written by NASA astronauts which would definitely bring going into space to real life for the children.

It is important when using Twitter in class to ensure that children are fully aware of e-safety implications and to have a discussion with school management before allowing children to view it. Schools should not be squeamish about using this social networking site as long as it done with full awareness of how to ensure that the children are trained in its use.

Astro Mike

Astro Mike is Mike Massimino an engineer and NASA astronaut who is is a veteran of two Space Shuttle missions, including the historic final Hubble Space Telescope  repair mission.

Mike keeps his followers up to date with his work as an Astronaut.

Other tweeps to follow are the Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) The National Space Center is “the lead center for space shuttle and International Space Station activities, and is home of the Mission Control Center and NASA astronaut corps.” The tweets are contributed to by interns in the astronaut corps and other Space centres as well as Johnson. It is regularly updated and will often include hyperlinks to further information.

The NASA_Astronauts twitter stream is a place to access all of the tweets by all NASA astronauts. This is well worth accessing as it contains such a mix of information and insight.

The Moon

What shape is the Moon?

I researched several websites and was lucky enough to have some suggestions from Tom Sale and Dawn Hallybone for which I am really grateful. These included some brilliant resources for study of the moon including What Shape is the Moon? from BGFL. Another such site is Sun, Earth and Moon from Simple Science.

The resource is one of those which has been developed to support knowledge acquisition of science facts around the QCA schemes of work. This is something of which we need to be aware but I also thought that teachers would already have many of these so thought of things which might be slightly different or promote work in a different way.

We choose the moon

The first site I was recommended was We choose the Moon which came from Ian Pratt who tweets as @sciencelabman. It is a visually engaging site which celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the Lunar Landings and is divided into 11 different stages using animations, archival photos, simulations, video and audio from mission control. The user can use the mission tracker to move through the mission at their own pace.

This set me to thinking that we were assuming that children would accept the moon landings without question but there may well be children who were aware of the claims that the moon landings were a hoax. This is something which has entered popular culture through the internet and films such as Capricorn One.

This set me to thinking that we were assuming that children would accept the moon landings without question but there may well be children who were aware of the claims that the moon landings were a hoax. This is something which has entered popular culture through the internet and films such as Capricorn One. So we present the children with the challenge of proving or disproving that the moon landings actually took place. They could think about the points made by conspiracy theorists and use images to prove or counter them. IWB software will massively support this.

The points made by people claiming that the landings never took place are explore on the How Stuff Works website http://science.howstuffworks.com/moon-landing-hoax.htm/printable. They take each point and rebuff them.

1. There are no stars in the background
2. There is a rock in one of the images which appears to have the letter C imprinted on it
3. There are shadows of differing lengths
4. The American flag appears to flap in the breeze
5. Technology was not sufficiently developed to keep the astronauts alive on the moon
6. The landing module weighed 17 tons but left no impression in the sand whilst the astronauts left footprints behind
7. The moons brought back from the moon are identical to those collected in Antarctica
8. When the landing module took off from the moon there weren’t any visible flames.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether you or the children believe whether the moon landings were real or faked as long as it provides the stimulus for a lively debate.

The children could use a range of images to annotate with evidence to prove their point. This could lead to the work being presented in a range of ways from simple word documents, homemade books, posters, annotated images, film presentations using Photostory, MovieMaker or similar applications.

Resources to support this could include this article on the conspiracy from the Daily Telegraph and this from The National Geographic debunking ‘myths ‘.

Testimonies
There could also be some mileage in looking at some of the testimonies cited on conspiracy sites to share with children. They could be used as a prompt for discussions or for writing.

One example is taken from the site UFOs-aliens http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html

The residents of Honeysuckle Creek, Australia, actually saw a different broadcast to the rest of the World. Just shortly before Armstrong stepped onto the Moons surface, a change could be seen where the picture goes from a stark black to a brighter picture. Honeysuckle Creek stayed with the picture and although the voice transmissions were broadcast from Goldstone, the actual film footage was broadcast from Australia. As Una watched Armstrong walking on the surface of the Moon she spotted a Coke bottle that was kicked in the right hand side of the picture. This was in the early hours of the morning and she phoned her friends to see if they had seen the same thing, unfortunately they had missed it but were going to watch the rebroadcast the next day. Needless to say, the footage had been edited and the offending Coke bottle had been cut out of the film. But several other viewers had seen the bottle and many articles appeared in The West Australian newspaper.

Imagesto support this work

Taken from pollsb.com

Taken from http://www.conspiracy-theories-hoax.com

Taken from http://www.howstuffworks.com

 

Panoramas.dk
If anyone is not aware of Panoramas then they should check it out. It is an online collection of 360 degree panoramic photographs of many different places and events some including audio. I have used several as a stimulus for writing with classes. Julian Wood (@ideas_factory) made me aware of their panoramic photographs of the Apollo lunar landings. The children can move the images and pan round a full circle and can select from each of the Apollo Lunar landing missions. Here are some examples:
Index

Apollo 11 – Lunar landing module with audio

Apollo 14 with audio

Apollo 17 – astronaut walking on the moon

 

Rocketlaunching

I returned to less controversial thoughts after this and thought about activities which could fire up the children’s excitement. In my last job we looked to get the Year 6s (all 100 of them) involved in something which would be enjoyable, slightly competitive and bring about learning in the weeks after their SAT tests and a colleague talked about a school which had built rockets with the children. This was brilliant as the children researched the best design, the best angle to use and then had to adjust their thoughts as they saw competitor rockets fare better or worse than they had thought!

Boing Boing image (www.boingboing.net)

The rockets work by half filling a 2 litre bottle with water and then using a foot pump to push air into it until the air pressure is so great that the rocket takes off. Sinclair MacKenzie (@mrmackenzie) recommended rokits which are available from www.rokit.com

I tweeted about this and received messages from Dawn Hallybone, Nicky Newbury and Jen Martindale who all taught me about the wonders of building rockets out of camera filhttps://lordlit.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=643&action=edit&message=10m canisters, a small amount of water and alka seltzers. This is new to me so I found this link to Cool Science which shows you how to do it. It really does look fantastic!!

UltimatelyI would love to see children making rockets like the image on the left.

Websites

I also found these websites which could be very useful.

NGfL Earth and Beyond

The Solar System

BBC Explore the Solar System site

Google Sky

The wonderful NASA collection of images of planets is well worth visiting.

NASA Planet image collection

Stellarium – Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. You will need to download on to your laptop or PC.

Stellarium

http://www.stellarium.org/

Films

Launch of the Space Shuttle from inside the cockpit (I love the high fives t 50 miles above the earth!)

A space shuttle landing

NASA’s first ever space walk

Today (16th November 2010) Brainpop shared this photo from their twitter account (@brainpop_uk)

http://www.panoramas.dk/moon/apollo-11.html

This is my final blog post to support my presentation at the Growing Greener Futures conference which was titled “How to make Book Soup”.

I have already listed books and short film clips  which could be used to support the teaching of environmental themes and in this post I will cover a small number of pieces of  music which could be used to evoke a sense of the outdoors in children’s minds. This is a limited list which hopefully will provide a starting point for discussions.

The music varies between classical, folk and a score written by the band British Sea Power for the 1934 film Man of Arran.

I would also recommend the lovely site Moodturn.com which has  range of ambient music to reflect different places like beaches, the rainforest and even nighttime.

 

Glosoli	Sigur Ros
Pastoral Symphony (Second Movement)	Beethoven
Morning from the Peer Gynt Suite	Greig
Northern Sky	Nick Drake
Fingal’s Cave	Mendelsohn
North Marine Drive	Ben Watt
Man of Arran	British Sea Power

Today I worked with another group of teachers about firing up the teaching of reading. Here are some of my musings on the matter. Many of you may have read the post ‘Promoting Reading’ which includes much of this and most of the books are similar but I have added some new authors in the last two weeks.

Reading is an art and something which we should seek to pass onto children. It is imperative that teachers have a good understanding of which books are available for them to use and which are best. We are at a time when publishing houses are producing some wonderful books and we must ensure that this is reflected in our reading stock.

Children need to hear books being read without interruption – this is about ensuring that teachers read texts outside the literacy shared and guided reading sessions. These moments are magical and show children the power of text. As teachers we know that books can make you feel uncomfortable, warm and fuzzy, cold, shocked, surprised, emotional (I could continue) but I am not convinced that this is something that we impart to the children. To do this we need sustained periods of time where the children can sit down, shut up, stick their thumbs in their mouth, plait someone’s hair or play with their shoelaces as they listen to a wonderful book.

This is hard for teachers to bring out about due to the perception of the packed curriculum and so it is vital that all schools have a collective view on how books will be shared with children.

Teachers also need to be aware of books which is why things like the Read for Joy wiki will hopefully grow as teachers share good books but it should also be done in-house with teachers given a small amount of time in staff meetings to make others aware of books which they love. If schools are trying to place an emphasis on reading then this should include developing a reading staff. It is certainly worth reading the UKLA Research on Teachers as Readers

I read the opening to The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman to the group to show them the power of a text which is not necessarily a comfortable read.

The book is wonderful and will grab children from the terror of the opening through its use of humour, pathos and tension to a great conclusion. It is highly likely that the children will draw comparisons to the text in their literacy work so the time may well impact on their writing but they should be hearing books of this quality read to them by a range of people (if possible)

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

We moved onto talking about reading comprehension and the importance of Guided Reading which can, at times, be difficult for teachers due to the sensitivities over what you do with other groups whilst you are hearing readers. Teachers do worry about the progress made by other groups but need to keep in mind the fact that guided reading is the best way of teaching, practising and applying reading skills and ensuring that children cover more than recall and inference questions.

One activity we quickly discussed to aid comprehension and certainly teachers’ assessment of children’s comprehension was to use an application like Microsoft Photostory with images from a text or children’s illustrations of a scene from a text for children to talk over. At its simplest children could be asked to recount what happens in the text – we know that children’s ability to summarise a text, events or a presentation is varied and that it is a key skill.
I know that, whilst on holiday, I asked my daughter to tell me about the Eva Ibbotson book “Journey to the River Sea” just as we walked into the Cornish town of Fowey – half an hour later we sat down next to the sea and she was about three quarters of the way through the book. She knew the book inside out but was unable to prioritise events in order to provide a brief summary of the events!

For children to be able to summarise this needs to be modelled and practised – talking about books is a great way in.

Next in our discussion we moved onto looking at a range of books which could fire up their children. I had chosen the theme of authors and illustrators who brought something different.

The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman
The Graveyard Book
Coraline
The Day I Swapped my Dad for two Goldfish
The Wolves in the Walls

The Pea and the Princess

Mini Grey
The Pea and the Princess
Traction Man is here
The Adventures of the Dish and Spoon
Biscuit Bear
Traction Man meets Turbo Dog
Egg Drop

Marcia Williams
Archie’s War – my scrapbook of the First World War by Archie Albright
My Secret War Diary by Flossie Albright

Catherine Rayner
Ernest
Augustus and his Smile
Harris finds his feet
Sylvia and Bird
Norris the bear who shared

The Ice Bear

Jackie Morris (Author and Illustrator)
The Ice Bear
Tell me a Dragon
Starlight Sailor (James Mayhew)
East of the Sun and West of the Moon
The Snow Leopard
How the Whale Became (Ted Hughes)
The Seal Children

Christian Birmingham (Illustrator)
Wombat goes Walkabout (Michael Morpurgo)
Windhover (Alan Brown)
The Sea of Tranquility (Mark Haddon)
The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S.Lewis)
The Night before Christmas (Clement C. Moore)

Monkey and me

Emily Gravett
Wolves
Meerkat Mail
Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fear
Monkey and Me
The Rabbit Problem
Spells
Orange Pear Apple Bear

Grahame Baker-Smith
FArTHER
Leon and the Place Between

Iggy Peck Architect

David Roberts (Illustrator)
Pooh! Is that you, Bertie?
The Troll (Julia Donaldson)
Tyrannosaurus Drip (Julia Donaldson)
Iggy Peck Architect (Andrea Beatty)

Marcia Williams
My Secret War Diary – WWII
Archie’s War – WWI
Bravo, Mr William Shakespeare

F.E. Higgins
The Eyeball Collector
The Black Book of Secrets
The Bone Magician

V.A. Richardson
The House of Windjammer
The Moneylender’s Daughter
The Street of Knives

Paul Dowswell
Auslander
The Cabinet of Curiosities
Powder Monkey

Helen Ward
Varmints (with Mark Craste)
The Tin Forest (with Wayne Anderson)
The Boat (with Ian P. Andrew)
The Dragon Machine (with Wayne Anderson)

I talked about the use of Storybird

Storybird
Finally I showed them how easy Storybird is to use.

It could be used for whole class or to target specific groups such as intervention groups supported by a TA or gifted and Talented to work independently. Here are some great examples from Pete Richardson.

For delegates of the meeting I would also recommend looking at these two resources below

Inanimate Alice
Finally I demonstrated the first chapter of Inanimate Alice This is the book which was demonstrated by Bill Boyd at Storytyne where he talked about his work with a group of teachers using Inanimate Alice.  It tells the story of the 8 year old Alice and her adventure in China. At present the book has four different chapters in four different locations. The text is written by an award winning author and is incredibly high quality. The text is moved through page by page which can be re-visited by clicking on the relevant icon. It is an interactive text which is divided into different frames using a wide range of modes. It used diagetic and non diagetic sound, animations, video films, exploded diagrams with a handheld mobile device as the main interaction tool between the character and the user.

The character was born digital (Alice was conceived as a digital project), it is a high quality text, has highly interactive engagement, uses trans-media engagement, covers different continents, gives potential for wide curriculum coverage and is progressively challenging – she moves from 8, 10, 11 and 13 in the fourth chapter. It is used widely in the Pacific Rim particularly in Australia but is being worldwide.

Useful links

http://www.inanimatealice.com

http://aliceandfriends.wikispaces.com

Sarah Brownsword talked about her work using Inanimate Alice in her classroom at TMEast earlier this year.

As I often do I finished with a flag up for my blog post on the Second World War which remains one of my most read posts.

Yesterday I posted a blog giving a lengthy list of books I recommended during my “How to make Book Soup” session and as promised I am now following it up with the list of videos which I gave to the delegates. Tomorrow I will post a set of suggestions for music which will evoke a sense of the outdoors for children.

Bernard the Ice Bear – Wrong landing

Key Stage One – Why you shouldn’t parachute in an areas with cactus plants in it.

Big Buck Bunny

Key Stage One – A beautiful tale of a Bunny who takes on the bullies in his area

Camionleon

Key Stage One / Key Stage Two – The adventures of a domesticated Chameleon.

Delivery

Year 5 / 6 – A space age fantasy story which could be linked to the book and film, Varmints. This could help tie a literacy sequence to cross curricular work on habitats or the environment.

Egg Hunt

Key Stage One – A wonderful animation which could be linked to the Mini Grey book, Egg Drop.

For the Birds

Key Stage One / Two – An amusing cartoon which could be also used to support PSHE work.

Kiwi

Key Stage One / Lower Key Stage Two – A tale of perseverance and achieving dreams – no matter what the consequences are.

Octopus in love

Key Stage Two – A hilarious story of true love with a twist at the end

Strawberry pie

Key Stage One – Good for speaking and listening activities

Twit Twit

Key Stage Two – The story of Charly a banjo player who faces a really strange obstacle: a toll right in the middle of nowhere in the desert managed by an old robot.

WWF New tiger discovery – Provocative advert about Tigers

Coasteering – This could be used for persuasive writing. (Explaining why people should take up coasteering and do it in Wales)

Arkive – Wildlife video clips – to be watched online. This web site has links to very high quality films of wildlife. The site is introduced by David Attenborough.

Wild Earth : Pandas

Whales hunting for herring – A documentary showing the intelligent ways in which whales hunt for herring

Earthquake proof bridge – National Geographic video on bridges which have been built to survive earthquakes.

Earthquake at school – Video of 1989 earthquake

Rabbit’s short tail – Native American storytelling

Wide mouthed frog – Storytelling of the great story

National Geographic – Wonderful resources to support study of habitats and animals

Tourist board videos

Wales

Jamaica Featuring Usain Bolt

Paris 24 hours in Paris – more than 6 minutes long.

The session will consider the ingredients required for the perfect book soup. How can books add spice to your curriculum and give children a taste of the magic of reading. Bill Lord will take you on a journey of books to support work around creative learning approaches using the great outdoors and will consider themes from global, national and local perspectives. Delegates will receive a detailed booklist and will have time to browse a range of quality texts to support their work back in the classroom.

Just before I was lucky enough to attend the Growing Greener Futures Conference in Stockton which was organised by Martin Waller. I would advise people to read Martin’s blog post on the day for further information.

I was privileged to be asked by Martin to deliver a session covering books which I called “How to make book soup”.

My proposal for the session was:

Much of the introduction was similar to recent blog posts I have put on this site recently but I did share a list of books with the delegates. I will add further posts this week with lists of films which can be accessed for free and also music which could be used in the classroom to evoke different senses associated with the outdoors.

The booklist below is huge but are ones I have read and feel could fire children up. Readers of this blog will have their own favourites which may not be on the list particularly those written by Dick King-Smith or some of those by Michael Morpurgo which I have not included. I do normally hyperlink to a website showing images of book covers when I write about them but I do trust the readers will understand why I haven’t in this case!

The subjects I have classified the books into are:

• Marine / Rivers
• Countryside / environment / relationships
• Animals
• Food
• Non fiction
• Non fiction / Narrative mixed genre
• Alphabet and Counting Books
• Miscellaneous

Marine / Rivers
The Snail and the Whale	Julia Donaldson and Alex Sheffler	Picture
The Little Boat	Kathy Henderson and Patrick Benson	Picture
Flotsam	David Weisner	Picture
The Sand Horse	Ann Turnbull and Michaael Foreman	Picture
Dougal’s  Deep-Sea Diary	Simon Bartram	Picture
The Fossil Girl	Catherine Brighton	Picture
My Friend Whale	Simon James	Picture
Dear Greenpeace	Simon James	Picture
Starlight Sailor	James Mayhew and Jackie Morris	Picture
Water Boy	Ros Asquith and Ian Andrew	Picture
Big Blue Whale	Nicola Davies and Nick Maland	Picture
Think of an Eel	Karen Wallace and Mike Bostock	Picture
Journey to the River Sea	Eva Ibbotson	Novel
The Boat	Helen Ward and Ian Andrew
The Seal Children	Jackie Morris	Picture
Storlax – the power of the deep	Robert Jackson and Bubbi Morthens	Novel
At the Beach (Postcards from Crabby Spit)	Roland Harvey	Picture
Wave	Suzy Lee	Picture
Shark (and other creatures) Dictionary	Clint Twist	Picture
Give her the River	Michael Dennis Browne and Wendell Minor	Picture
The Big Big Sea	Martin Waddell	Picture
Two Frogs	Chris Wormell	Picture
Countryside / environment / relationships
Bringing down the moon	Jonathan Emmett and Vanessa Cabban	Picture
Tales of Outer Suburbia	Shaun Tan	Short stories
Voices in the Park	Anthony Browne	Picture
Lost and Found	Oliver Jeffers	Picture
Give her the River	Michael Dennis Browne and Wendell Minor	Picture
Grandma and Grandpa’s Garden	Neil Griffiths and Gabriella Buckingham	Picture
Sylvia and Bird	Catherine Rayner	Picture
The Iron Man	Ted Hughes	Short novel
Bloodfever (Young Bond)	Charlie Higson	Novel
Airborn	Kenneth Oppel	Novel
The Island	Armin Greder	Picture
The Paperbag Prince	Colin Thompson	Picture
The Wheel on the School	Meijert DeJong and Maurice Sendak	Novel
Framed	Frank Cottrell Boyce	Novel
Reavers’ Ransom	Emily Diamand	Novel
The Flower	John Light	Picture
Varmints	Helen Ward and Marc Craste	Picture (and film)
Into the Forest	Anthony Browne	Picture
The Seal Oil Lamp (Eskimo folktale)	Dale De Armond	Short Novel
The Puddleman	Raymond Briggs	Graphic Novel
The Great Kapok Tree	Lynne Cherry	Picture
The Great Paper Caper	Oliver Jefferies	Picture
The Tin Forest	Helen Ward and Wayne Anderson	Picture
The Arrival	Shaun Tan	Textless Picture
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs	Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett	Picture (and film)
Home in the Sky	Jeannie Baker	Picture
The Lost Happy Endings	Carol Ann Duffy and Jane Ray	Picture
How to Heal a Broken Wing	Bob Graham	Picture
The Ranger’s Apprentice Series	John Flanagan	Novels
Dinosaurs and all that Rubbish	Michael Foreman	Picture
Jaguar	Helen Cowcher	Picture
Brother Eagle, Sister Sky	Chief Seattle and Susan Jeffers	Picture
Oi Get Off Our Train!	John Burningham	Picture
One World	Michael Foreman	Picture
Where the Forest Meets the Sea	Jeanie Baker	Picture
The Tower to the Sun	Colin Thompson	Picture
Out of the Ashes	Michael Morpurgo	Picture
This is the Sea that Feeds Us	Robert F Baldwin	Picture
The Secret Garden	Francis Hodgson Burnett	Novel
Tom’s Midnight Garden	Philippa Pearce	Novel
The Graveyard Book	Neil Gaiman	Novel
My flower, your flower	Melanie Walsh	Picture
Storm Boy	Paul Owen Lewis	Picture
Way Home	Libby Hathorn and Gregory Rogers	Picture
The Ice Bear	Jackie Morris	Picture
Out of the Ashes	Michael Morpurgo	Novel
Farm Boy	Michael Morpurgo	Novel
Reaver’s Ransom	Emily Diamand	Novel
Animals
Baa Humbug!	Mike Jolley and  Deborah Allwright	Picture
Beetle Boy	Lawrence David and Delphine Durand	Picture
Wombat goes Walkabout	Michael Morpurgo and Christian Birmingham	Picture
Windhover	Christian Birmingham	Picture
The Rabbits	John Marsden and Shaun Tan	Picture
Wolves	Emily Gravett	Picture
Daft Bat	Tony Ross and Jeanne Willis	Picture
Flutter by, Butterfly	Petr Horacek	Picture
Owl Babies	Martin Waddel and Patrick Benson	Picture
All Things Bright and Beautiful	Ashley Bryan	Picture
Ernest	Catherine Rayner	Picture
Harris finds his feet	Catherine Rayner	Picture
All Pigs are Beautiful	Dick King-Smith	Picture
Walk with a Wolf	Janni Howker and Sarah Fox-Davies	Picture
The Emperor’s Egg	Martin Jenkins	Picture
Tigress	Nick Dowson and Jane Chapman	Picture
White Owl, Barn Owl	Nicola Davies and Michael Foreman	Picture
Ice Bear	Nicola Davies and Gary Blythe	Picture
Farley Farts	Birte Muller	Picture
I love animals	Flora McDonnell	Board
The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark	Jill Tomlinson and Paul Howard	Picture
Tortuga	Paul Geraghty	Picture
The Wonderful Journey	Paul Geraghty	Picture
The Great Green Forest	Paul Geraghty	Picture
Tadpole’s Promise	Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross	Picture
Howling at the Moon	Michael Catchpool and Jill Newton	Picture
After the Storm	Nick Butterworth	Picture
Windhover	Alan Brown and Christian Birmingham	Picture
The Secret Path	Nick Butterworth	Picture
The Rabbit Problem	Emily Gravett (and a lot of rabbits)	Picture
Honeybee’s Busy Day	Richard Flower	Slot book
Flutter by, Butterfly	Petr Horacek	Board book
What is black and white?	Petr Horacek	Board Book
Strawberries are red	Petr Horacek	Board Book
Silverfin (Young Bond Series)	Charlie Higson	Novel
Wolf Brother	Michelle Paver	Novel
The White Giraffe (+ other books in the same series)	Lauren St.John	Novel
Love that Dog!	Sharon Creech	Poetry
Old MacDonald’s Farm	Eric Smith	Picture
The Great Dog Bottom Swap	Peter Bentley and Mei Matsuoka	Picture
No room for Napoleon	Adria Meserve	Picture
Wanted: The Perfect Pet	Fiona Roberton	Picture
The 108th Sheep	Ayano Imai	Picture
The Great Paper Caper	Oliver Jeffers	Picture
FArTHER	Graeme Baker-Smith	Picture
Beetle Boy	Lawrence David and Delphine Durand	Picture
Food
The Troll	Julia Donaldson and David Roberts	Picture
Growing Good	Bernard Ashley and Anne Wilson	Picture
Sam’s snack	David Pelham	Box book
War and Peas	Michael Foreman	Picture
Vegetable Glue	Susan Chandler and Elena Odriozola	Picture
Non fiction
Apple Green and Runner Bean	Phyllis King	Picture
Flowers	Gallimard Jeunesse and Rene Mettler	Picture
Amazing Bugs	Richard Ferguson	Pop up
My best book of Night-time Animals	Belinda Weber	Picture
Bloomin’ Rainforests (Horrible Geography)	Anita Ganeri
Micro Monsters (extreme encounters with invisible armies)	Kingdom	Picture
The Cookbook for Boys (Usborne First Cookbooks)	Abigail Wheatley	Spiralbound
Children’s Step-by-Step Cookbook	Angela Wilkes	Hardback
Large as Life (101 animals actual size)	Mike Kelly	Picture
Ape	Martin Jenkins and Vicky White	Picture
Non fiction / Narrative mixed genre
Growing Frogs	Vivian French	Picture
Caterpillar Butterfly	Vivian French and Charlotte Voake	Picture
Tadpole’s Promise	Tony Ross Jeanne Willis
Alphabet and Counting Books
LMNO Peas	Keith Baker	Hardback picture
Animalia	Graeme Base	Picture
The Water Hole	Graeme Base	Picture
Gathering (A Northwoods counting book)	Betsy Bowen	Picture
Miscellaneous
The Hobbit (Graphic Novel)	JRR Tolkein, David Wenzel and Charles Dixon	Graphic Novel
The Land of Green Ginger	Noel Langley	Novel
Old Macdonald’s Farm	Eric Smith	Hardback
Memory Bottles	Beth Shoshan and Katie Pamment	Picture
The Pencil	Allan Ahlberg and Bruce Ingman	Picture
Duck, Death and the Tulip	Wolf Erlbruch	Picture
A Child’s Garden (A story of Hope)	Michael Foreman	Picture
Seven Ways to Catch the Moon	M.P. Robertson	Picture
The Once upon a Time Map Book	B.G. Hennessy and Peter Joyce	Map
A Balloon for Grandad	Nigel Gray and Jane Ray	Picture
Hey!What’s that Nasty Whiff? (Say poo to pollution)	Julia Jarman and Garry Parsons	Picture
The Pebble in my Pocket (A History of our earth)	Meredith Hooper and Chris Coady	Picture
The Once Upon a Time Map Book	B G Hennessy	Picture
Man on the Moon (a day in the life of Bob)	Simon Bartram	Picture

Tonight I had to make my presentation for TMX from home as I was hit by manflu!

My virtual #TMX presentation

My presentation was about the Read for Joy wiki, the World map of Books and my general views on reading.

Ultimately I am looking to develop a sense of excitement around reading and hope that you will join in on the Read for Joy wiki.
Both are designed to be easy to access and use and just need people to share their ideas.

In terms of Read for Joy I foresee that people will simply add new books with the Twitter hashtag #readforjoy which can then be added to the wiki.

My presentation is here:

The Read for Joy wiki is here

Read for Joy

The World Map of Books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you would like to see some of the other presentations from the evening (and you should try to) Jim Maloney’s wonderful blog has details here