Brain Break: Ants in Your Pants

Brain Break: my second graders LOVE this song so much; it's a fun and energetic brain break that gets them singing and dancing.

Maths Money Bingo

 

 

Here are some bingo boards I made for maths class to strengthen money concepts.

With the younger years I use it for notes and coins recognition, and with older students I use it for calculating problems (ie. "I bought 5 pens at $2 each. How much did I spend?").

The kids particulary enjoy conducting the game, and formulating the problems themselves.

M & M Maths

 

 M & Ms, Smarties, Jelly Beans..... all delicious, and also lots of fun to use in math lessons. Initially I used candy for sharing and dividing activities, but they are brilliant for data and graphing activities too.

I have blogged previously about Jelly Bean maths here.
Here is a sample worksheet for Early Stage 1, that is easily modified for older students.

Assembly Song: Friends

Jack Johnson's "We're Going to be Friends" is cute some for an assembly, or class slideshow to promote friendship and positive interactions between students. 

Click on the image for the video:

Technology: Robotics Lego Mindstorm

 

Robotics: Lego Mindstorm NXT 2.0

This is Alpha Rex. He is a humanoid robot made using Lego Mindstorm NXT hardware and programming software.

As a Robotics coordinator, I provide a weekly cocurricular activity to primary students to make and program robots.

Students follow a series of instructions to construct a variety of robots and program them using Mindstorm software. Touch, light, sound and ultrasonic sensors can be programmed to complete specific tasks.

 

 

Robotics provides students the opportunity to pursue self interests whilst challenging their problem solving and critical thinking skills.

Here is a Robotics Club evaluation sample sheet I made for students to fill out upon completion of their cocurricular lunchtime Robotics Club:

I take lots of photos and video footage of completed robots so that I can make a movie for assembly at the end of each term. Parents are invited and they enjoy seeing what their children have been involved with in Robotics Club.

Beautiful Butterfly Rubs

 

 

To make these effective butterfly artworks, I first googled a blank butterfly template (  <  see example ), which I then reproduced and laminated for each student. The kids then traced around their butterflies using oil pastels. They overlapped multiple butterflies and then smudged the outside of each butterfly to create this unique effect.

Group Work

Bust out these wrist bands (I purchased these ones from Smiggle, and the hanger from Howard's Storage) when doing small group work in the classroom.

It helps prevent kids swapping and changing during group work.

Fonts

 

These are some of my FAVOURITE fonts, free for everyone to use!

1001 Free Fonts has lots of free fonts for downloading onto your computer, as does DaFont.

Just download them, install into your computer's font file and you'll have automatic access to them next time you're using Word.

Poster Display

We love making poster displays from cardboard. Just cut them out in the desired shape and create a collage using pictures from the Internet or magazines!

Hand-Held Fans

 

Year 1 made these hand-held Japanese fans for our cultural unit of work.

 

We started off with a blank piece of paper and drew Japanese scenes in lead pencil.

Some ideas include:

• Mount Fuji
• Map of Japan
• Japanese flag
• Zen garden
• Lanterns
• Pandas
• Japanese landscape
• Festivals

Students then painted the scenes using water-colour paints and folded into a fan.

Birthday Door Display

 

We used this door display to show our visitors whose birthday it was that day. 

The names were affixed using sticky-back velcro under the rainbow.

Literacy: Mr Quangle Wangle's Hat

Mr Quangle Wangle's Hat 

by Edward Lear

Check out these cute collages by Kindy! 

After reading 'Mr Quangle Wangle's Hat', Kindergarten made these collages out of cardboard hats. 

We used ribbon, scrap booking paper, sparkles, glitter, stickers and other decorations to beautify our hats.

Adjectives Activity

Wordle (as previously blogged about here), is a web tool which creates beautiful word clouds.
I have used Wordle twice with my students; the first as an adjectives activity where they had to think of words that described themselves, and the second as a Warm Fuzzy activity, where each child was assigned a partner they had to describe and create a word cloud for. These were printed off and laminated for classroom display.