Busy Busy Week!

Last week was quite possibly one of the busiest weeks we have had this year at Snowsfields! We took part in both days of the Mathletics Four Nations Challenge (See photographs below) with children competing with others across the whole of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I have to say the commitment and dedication from both Teachers and Children was outstanding and the results below show just how much we wanted to do our best! Well done everybody! If only we had not had that Internet outage for and hour – who knows where we would have been placed? Here’s to next year!

As well as this, we also ‘Wore Our Spots’ in aid of Children In Need. With the vast majority of the school (staff included) getting dressed up in their finest spotty clothes to help raise as much money as possible. The children had a truly awesome day, writing sensitive acrostic poems, cooking spotty cakes and finding out about how the small part we play in raising money can help make such a huge difference to so many people! Have a look at our Photographs below to see what we got up to.

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EYFS – Design a Monster

In Early years, the chidlren have been designing monsters for a competition as part of their work using ‘Teach Your Monster To Read‘. They will find out if they have been succesful next Friady – fingers crossed!
To access TYMTR just visit our school website and login with the details given to you by Jodie & Zoe – its absolutely fantastic!!

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Thank You
Matt Rogers

ICT Subject Leader

Spelling Bee & Spellodrome

At Snowsfields sesterday we held our very first spelling bee competition! Over the past couple of weeks the children have had the chance to practice a large number of spellings in order to compete at the event. With class competitions being held throughout the day, and of course the children dressed up as bees, it was a thoroughly enjoyable day for all who took part, with both a winner and a runner up in each class.

To help the children practice their spellings we used the fantastic programme ‘Spellodrome‘ which although we have had in school for some time now, it hasn’t seen as much use a its sister application ‘Mathletics’. However we hope that now we have relaunched it within school it will become much more widely used by the children – parents, it can be accessed through the school website using the same login details as your child’s Mathletics login.

Thank you very much to Laura for organising the event, and all of the ‘BEErilliant‘ children who took part.

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Matt Rogers
ICT Subject Leader

Royal Society TEL Project

Last night we had the privilege to attend the Royal Society Event regarding the Technology Enhanced Learning project of which our Code Club was a part.

On arrival we were greeted by a host of people excited to see children at such a usually adult dominated event, and were given first hand experiences at the TEL project themselves. We learnt how to become a dentist (although to be honest I would probably only let MJ work on my teeth as the rest were more eager to drill holes through them instead)! We also got to experience using table sized tablets as a source of collaboration within class, an exciting prospect as something which as an ICT subject leader would be very keen to investigate further in the future.

However for the children the most exciting activity was the ability to be able to interact with a ‘touchscreen TV’. Although not strictly a TV display, more a mirrored version of a desktop, the sheer scale of the device was what seem to encapsulate them the most (42” +). Designed to be used as a social communication tool for Autistic children and so built upon the idea of non verbal communication, I could really see this being used effectively in a wider range of settings, particularly within EYFS and KS1 as the touch screen itself uses multi gesture commands allowing more than one user to work on an activity collaboratively – think IWB for many hands.

However, the main reason for our visit, as mentioned previously was that our Code Club was filmed as part of the TEL project, where they (unfortunately) captured myself on camera discussing the impact of a computing based curriculum beginning to be delivered into school, as well as filming and conversing with the children who attended. The lead on the project, Richard Noss, was incredibly interested in the views of Yasmine and as a result, she very bravely spoke about her reasons behind computing and what she feels are the benefits of learning such skills – to over 150 people might I add!

On the whole the evening was excellent and the children really took upon the ideas being discussed and intellectually thought about how they felt in relation to issues raised and discussed. I was so proud as both a teacher and ICT subject leader of all 5 of my/our coders and their superb reflection on the school – even receiving acclaim from the Director of Strategy for Ofsted for our “incredible children”!!

A final version of the film itself is available here, (our children are about 10 minutes in) further information of the TEL projects that have taken place of the past 5 years can be found here. You can also read the ‘live’ blog written by the children during the conference and the questions they posed to both myself and other academics here.

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Matt Rogers

ICT Subject Leader