Archive for February, 2006

Twin Castles

Feb 27

Posted by lmhartley in KS2, history | No Comments

twin castles
Sandaig Primary’s Class 4M have been making a display for their classroom and blogging about it. They were kind enough to allow me to post it here.

Primary 4m’s topic this term is Knights and Castles.
We made ‘twin castles’ for our art last week.
Here is what we did.
We had this equipment:
Coloured paper, one sheet of white card, scissors, glue, and a pencil.
First we drew a castle on the coloured paper. We had to cut it out in one piece. We had to glue the castle and the outline of the castle on to the card. We had to be careful to leave a space between the pieces of paper and to line them up.
We had to cut out doors, windows, moon and a flag to stick on.
It was fun and they look really good up on the wall.

Primary 4 M.

I wanted to use their display so I was delighted to see their reply:

Linda, we would be honoured if you used our picture in ‘The Classroom Displays Blog’.
We hope you are having a nice time(blush)
Primary 4

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Repeating patterns

Feb 20

Posted by lmhartley in Art, KS2 | 4 Comments

repeating patterns2, originally uploaded by LMH_.

We made these fabric squares in year 3 last week. It was the final phase of our work on repeating patterns. Hanging them up as part of our classroom displays has made the room look very festive!
We made the printing blocks by drawing card templates then cutting the blocks out of neoprene foam and sticking them onto thick, folded cardboard.

The work on patterns has been good fun. It stared with maths patterns, then Mhindi hands.

Then we moved on to printing patterns using bought blocks.

If you want to see the rest of the children’s designs here’s a link to a Flickr Slideshow of the whole project.

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Feelings

Feb 19

Posted by lmhartley in SEN | 1 Comment

Feelings, originally uploaded by angela_oxon.

I wonder if these are stock photos or photos of children in the school? I like the general idea of the display but I wonder if it might have more impact for SEN if these were familiar faces. This display is based in the SEN classroom.
There are some good, free, on-line resources for face reading including Rubberface That uses drawings or this one The Feelings game . I’ve used them with children with syntatic pragmatic disorder or just general speech and language difficulties.
On another note I wonder how much the border adds to this display. I’m assuming it is a pre-cut bought one. Personally I think it’s too busy and will distract children from the thrust of the display.
I like the interactive elements though. It might be fun to have 2 feelings wheels – then the person working with the children could express theirs as well!

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Postcards from virtual friends

Feb 8

Posted by lmhartley in geography | No Comments

Postcards and map, originally uploaded by LMH_.

Geography displays in the classroom are a particular favourite of mine. We knew that we needed to familiarise the children with the UK map but we were worried by how remote and unreal the geography topic seemed to Year 3. I thought I might be able to use my contacts with the Teaching Assistants Forum to bring it to life. As you can see from this thread it went very well.We got postcards from children in Shetland and Cornwall. Year 3 spent a lovely afternoon writing postcards back (thus meeting one of their literacy targets along the way!), learned a lot about two places at opposite ends of the UK and places that had seemed strange and unreal turned out to be the homes of new friends.

April 2006 – update.

We are moving back to our original classroom soon and I like the shiny backing paper on this display so much it’s coming with us! It’s been up in our temporary classroom for at least two years!It turned out to be a huge single sheet of surplus from a local paper mill. It’s very durable, doesn’t show marks and is endlessly forgiving of staple guns!The only slight drawback is that it doesn’t photograph very well, too reflective. However when I took it down I was delighted to see that the reverse is a nice, slightly shiny silver colour :-) Perfect for our plants display next term!

It’s going to save me hours – epecially as the wall it is destined for now has a computer bench in front of it!

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