Learning Gems

Teachers have always shared material and ideas (some better than others, it’s true) and now the Internet has made sharing much easier for all of us.

I must admit to being a slow sharer; I always thought my work and ideas unworthy until I was encouraged by several colleagues. However, once I started sharing I was unstoppable!

A light bulb moment

Anyway, it suddenly occurred to me that as a blogger, I now have a way to share materials with a wider audience and, hopefully, save someone a little bit of time or, even better, inspire them!

So here goes…

Sharing some recent ideas:

Literature Discovery Festival

I’m quite pleased with this idea…feel free to use it if it suits your school situation. I decided one week to celebrate literature and reading was simply not enough! Rather than one ‘Book Week’ I decided my school needed a three week festival to celebrate books, reading, writing, literacy…etc. It includes author visits. During the festival I am running a daily quiz and several competitions including:

Fifty-word story competition: I’ve run this completion before and was quite surprised how well it worked.

Bookmark book review competition: Designed this sheet yesterday to simplify the book review process .

I hope the above handouts and ideas are useful to you and save you little bit of time!

During the festival I am also running an adapted version of the reading game. (The link is a Powerpoint presentation explaining the game.) I have adapted the game to suit my school library.

Enjoy!

PS: Please let me know if you find these ideas useful.

I am still exploring the web looking for ideas to help with my Book Week Literacy project, a story book using the prompt “Imagine if I discovered…” In my travels I found Big Universe Online Children’s Books and created a small story using the prompt myself. The book was easy to construct using illustrations provided on site although I did have to watch the demo first. It was approved for online publishing in a few hours. I decided that Big Universe has huge ‘learning gem’ potential. I can imagine teachers and parents using it as a literature and writing learning tool. Hopefully, it will also help me to create some excitement for my Book Week project!

The books are free to create and read online.

One of the projects I am working on for this year’s Book Week is a literacy project which will involve our primary school students in the writing, publication and launch of a school story book built around the prompt ‘Imagine if I discovered…” The aim will be for each student to contribute to the publication by responding individually to the topic. Each student will be allocated one page in the book.

Of course this is a major endeavour and today I have been searching the web for ideas and inspiration. I am always looking for imaginative ways to motivate students to write and think creatively and I was particularly looking for visual strategies to act as ‘warm up’ exercises. I stumbled across Toondoo and started to fiddle…

This site has huge potential as a creative writing and planning tool that is both fun and simple to use.