Look Out For The Poddle

Well I nearly put my foot in it again today, (that's the Poddle not the puddle). As my senior unit colleague was coming into my room again whilst I was off playing soccer outside, I enquired what she was going to regale my little darlings with. She said that they would conclude the work on mass they had been doing by looking at how you can make several alternate combinations of mass when measuring with pan balances. I "foolishly" said that I thought I had seen an interactive that covered just this type of activity and left saying I would get it ready. Of course a quick search reminded me again that there are increasing times when my memory is not as functional as I recall it used to be. Alas in my set of Learning Federation objects, (see Oh For A Keyboard below), and at other sites I couldn't find what I thought I had seen. Undaunted it was off to Google and after about five minutes I found the Poddles at PBS Cyberchase games. After a quick five minute exploration at lunchtime we had the activity in hand. A later debrief revealed that the Poddles was just what the doctor had ordered.

Another neat activity that was greatly enhanced by the board today was with a reading activity. All children had a copy of the text however when we came to look through the passage for "tricky" words it was the digital copy shown onto the board where attention was drawn. Adding annotations directly to the passage via the board only made it even more clear as was the possibility of highlighting how the surrounding text can offer assistance on working out what "tricky" words might mean. Much more powerful than holding up an A4 or even A3 piece of paper and asking children to direct their attention to it.