Back At The Coalface

At last the hearing has returned and I no longer have an excuse to stay at home so it's back to the classroom and checking out what the children have been doing since I have been away. First thing on the agenda was to catch up on the stories that they have been publishing. Alas some of the children had taken advantage of the nicer nature of the replacement teachers who have been filling in for me this last two weeks. The stories have become a little lax with some dodgey punctuation and some other errors appearing in their final draft work where none should be. Normally this would have meant some quite tedious one-on-one repetitive work, explaining to individuals how to go about remedying this. Aha but not so with the IWB. We soon had poor H's work up on the board for all to see. A caution to all that his was not the only piece of work that had these problems was enough to get a bit more focus on the piece. Soon we were explaining the in and outs of using the "invisible" characters in Word to show us where there were too many spaces, where "Enter" had been used where it shouldn't plus revealing a number of other features which would help make their otherwise interesting stories that little bit more intelligible. Overall the SMART Board provided some excellent productivity gains with an otherwise 2-3 hours of individual instruction being replaced by fifteen minutes in sit, (that is not allowing for the vagaries of some of my little darling's memories in remembering and applying what we had covered).