Constantly revising and experimenting with new ideas

As the holidays come to an end, I'm really looking forward to getting back into teaching and seeing my class tomorrow! Michelle and I are constantly reviewing our practice and coming up with new things to experiment with. After being introduced to the story of Dr DeSoto at one of our lectures last term, we're going to try embedding that video into an Explain Everything for the students to watch as an independent reading activity. On subsequent slides we have activities where they work with the rich language which is included in the video, and then create an illustration to summarise the story - watch this space for the results!

After discussing the needs of our students during one of our University sessions, we highlighted letter identification and sounds as a gap in knowledge for many students. I want to try some additional work on these to see if it makes a difference - I've created Explain Everything projects for five (most used) letters of the alphabet - again for students to work through independently during reading rotations. The below screen shots show what sort of activities are included on each project - the first slide includes a sound bite so students are able to hear the letter name, sound and which words are on the page. I'm excited about trying this resource this week and building an entire alphabet if it proves successful!

listen to ‘Letter T’ on Audioboo