They have since been mentioned in their local news: http://www.kenilworthweeklynews.co.uk/community/pupils-create-winning-video-1-5179971

Congratulations once again to North Leamington School pupils for making such an enthusiastic video! 

Photo By: Wesley Fryer

Summer Calendar Dates: Father’s Day Activities for The Classroom

Sunday the 16^th of June marks this year’s Father’s Day – an occasion that honours our fathers, grandfathers, and other father figures in our lives. Commemorating the day can be a fun and engaging classroom activity that can get the children crafting, writing, and improving their presentation skills. This Father’s Day, why not try out these ideas for classroom activities dedicated to dear old dads?

Scrapbook Making

First off, show your students how to fold some sheets of coloured A4 paper in half to create an A5-size booklet, which can be fastened in the middle with coloured string or staples. Next, get each student to make a Father’s Day scrapbook, which can be filled with personal father-related memories.  They may want to include family photographs (photocopies, of course – you don’t want an army of angry mums storming your classroom waving their tattered photo albums at you accusingly), pictures of his favourite hobbies cut out of magazines, hand-drawn pictures of themselves with their father, and a section where the pupil can either write a heart-felt message to their pops, or share a few fun memories they had together. This is a very sweet and personal project that would make a great keepsake, so make a point of the fact that you want to see each of your students using their best handwriting and drawing skills.

Father’s Day Presentation

This class activity will involve each pupil carrying out some stealth research on their father’s life without him knowing about it. The idea is that the child will present a five minute talk about their dad (with information gathered from those closest to him) in a ‘This is Your Life’-style presentation.

Prepare a questionnaire sheet that the child can take home and fill in with the help of mum and/or other family members. Include questions like, ‘My Dad is…years old,’ and ‘My dad works as a…’

Cover areas such as hobbies, favourite music, favourite sports (and sports teams), favourite holiday destinations, favourite food, and so on. Then get your students to take it in turns presenting their findings to the rest of the class. Primary school children are likely to have less experience and confidence speaking in front of a crowd, so this easy-peasy subject matter should be a good way to ease younger students into public speaking.

Family Tree Research

I’m sure many fathers would be delighted to receive a copy of their ancestry for Father’s Day. Family tree research is a fascinating area of study that can prompt children to develop an interest in history, because they can (quite literally) relate to the information.

Using the Internet and interviews with family members, get your pupils to investigate their family tree as far back as they can go. They can start off by looking into areas such as their surnames and the meanings thereof, which in turn will help them find out where they came from and how they came to live where they do now. They may be able to find out about their grandparents’ and great grandparents’ occupations, what their family members were doing during the Second World War or even the First World War, and so on. Then, get them to present their findings in a project notebook or in the form of a family tree diagram with branches.

Paper Mache Trophy

Get each of your students to make a ‘World’s #1’ Dad trophy as a Father’s Day present. You’ll need a balloon, strips of newspaper, PVA glue, a toilet roll tube, some thick card to make handles and a base, some gold paint, and a black marker pen. Blow up the balloon until it’s half full and get the children to cover it with three layers of newspaper and glue, allowing one coat to dry before adding another. When it’s all dry, pop the balloon inside with a pin and carefully cut a circle around the top of the paper form to make it look like the trophy bowl. Next, make 1 cm long cuts into one side of the toilet roll holder and fan them out so you can affix the tube to the base of the trophy bowl. Then cover the tube and bottom of the trophy with another layer of paper mache. When that’s dry, affix the base and handles to the trophy and then paint the whole thing gold. Finally, draw the World’s #1 Dad ‘engraving’ onto the front of the trophy and it’s all ready for gift time.

So there you have it – four Father’s Day-related activities for your classroom. If you’re looking for more fun classroom project theme ideas, check out our School Stickers Summer Calendar.

If you have tried any of these projects with your pupils, please leave a comment below.

With school being such a huge part of children’s lives, it’s no surprise that such a large proportion of children’s TV programmes and books are set in and around the classroom.

However they also contain a lot of characters who will be familiar to children and teachers alike. No one has been to Hogwarts, and yet everyone knows a Draco Malfoy. The yellow, four-fingered world of the Simpsons is entirely fictional and yet Bart is a familiar face.

The problems of motivation and behaviour are often key plot points in these stories, but these ordinary problems are hidden amongst the extraordinary lives of the school children. Chemistry becomes potions and accidental breakages become a situation where the whole school has blown up.

The problem of motivation

Intelligence isn’t the only deciding factor as to whether a child does well at school or not. Other important factors are things like self-esteem and personality. If a child doesn’t feel good about themselves for whatever reason, it is unlikely they will do well and they are far more likely to be disruptive in the classroom.

What many children lack is motivation, so one of the most important roles of a teacher is to motivate their students, so that they want to learn. There are various ways in which you can do this and it depends on the specific needs on the student.

Here are 5 examples of fictional children who can be found on your TV screen or amongst your bookshelves, who lack motivation and advice on how they can be successfully motivated.

Mildred Hubble from The Worst Witch

Long before a certain bespectacled boy wizard entered the global consciousness, another pupil at another school of magic was capturing the imagination of children: Mildred Hubble, the titular worst witch at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches.

Mildred is well-meaning but disorganised and clumsy but her teacher, Miss Hardbroom, interprets this as Mildred just not trying hard enough.

Perhaps Miss Hardbroom should have offered Mildred a little extra support, offering praise and encouragement so that Mildred could see her strengths and enhance them while working on those weaknesses.

Mildred gets into trouble as a result of bullying. After being teased about her cat being different to the other cats, she turns the bully into a pig. If an otherwise good child does something wrong, then it is important to talk about why they did it and how they feel about it, as it might be the result of bullying.

Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter

Hogwarts is probably the most famous fictional school of all time and a place where children for generations to come will dream of attending. However, the school isn’t without its problem students and if anything, all the same problems exist at Hogwarts as they do in ordinary schools – they are just notched up a gear and given a magical twist!

Draco Malfoy is a fairly stereotypical literary villain: an arrogant and attention seeking bully. In just one of many instances of picking on weaker kids, he steals Neville Longbottom’s Remembrall and flies off with it.

Each classroom tends to have a Malfoy and they can be the hardest to deal with. It is important to make a note of them and keep an eye out as much as possible. Spotting and acknowledging any name-calling, however trivial, it is good to deal with straight away, so that the child knows that this kind of behaviour will not be tolerated from day one.

Matilda Wormwood from Matilda

Matilda is famous for her telekinetic powers and her mischievous pranks at Crunchem Hall Primary school.

Throughout the book her anger and frustration comes out in the form of pranks, like when she tipped a glass of water containing a salamander over the head of the most hated and feared teacher, Miss Trunchbull.

Matilda acts out because of an unhappy home life, where her parents don’t love, appreciate or encourage her talents. It is important to identify children with low self-esteem and typically you can do this by spotting  those who ‘act out’ and those who ‘act in’. These are just the different ways in which an extravert or an introvert would deal with feelings of inadequacy.

With praise and encouragement self-esteem can be built back up again. A good way of doing this is to emphasise that everyone makes mistakes and this is ok. Often children with low self-esteem will give up out of frustration if they can’t do something, or get something wrong.

Tracy Beaker from The Stories of Tracy Beaker

Tracy is a lonely and frustrated child who lives in a children’s’ care home affectionately referred to by the kids as ‘the dumping ground.’ Even though most children never find themselves in this situation, to some extent all of them can identify with feelings of loneliness and rejection on a smaller scale, which is probably why the story is so successful.

Her anger and frustration comes out in aggressive behaviour as well as simply telling tales. Dissatisfied with her own life, she often says that her mum is a Hollywood actress who is coming to collect her one day.

In anger with another girl at the care home, she breaks her Mickey Mouse clock. It is this kind unpredictable, aggressive behaviour that can be difficult to deal with. A lot positive encouragement and praise is needed to maintain motivation.

Often, offering rewards for completion of work and good behaviour can be a great way of incentivising children with anger problems because they get noticed for their good behaviour instead of getting attention for their bad behaviour all the time. . In the moment, when the child sees that they have done right and earned themselves a reward, they get to acknowledge in themselves their good qualities instead of focussing on their bad behaviours all the time.

Hopefully this should give some ideas on how you could motivate your classroom, as well as remind you of some classic children’s characters. Your classroom might not be as fun as those in the books, but there are a still lot of things that you can do to improve motivation. Here are some useful links on how to motivate children in the classroom.

Do you have any useful tips for keeping children motivated?

The winners of our first 2 pairs of Camp Beaumont tickets are…

Amie form Lord Grey School

Shannon from Saint Benedict Catholic Academy.

Congratulations to you both! You have both won a pair of Camp Beaumont Tickets.  Your school’s have been contacted and your tickets will be with you soon. For more information about your prize visit www.mystickers.co.uk.

We will be giving 2 more pairs of tickets away at the end of July, so remember to keep logging your stickers – the more you log, the more times you will be entered into the prize draw!

Image by:  audio-luci-store 

How To Make Your Classroom Green

With World Environment Day approaching there is no better time to bring eco-friendly ideas into the classroom. The theme for 2013 is eat, think, save, and encourages us to think about the amount of food we waste, and the effects that wastage can have on our environment. Here are some fun ideas to teach children about going green.

Encourage Recycling

Recycling is one of the best ways to take care of the environment. An interesting way to introduce the idea of recycling to children is a classroom composting experiment. The aim of the experiment is to explain why worms are known as ‘nature’s recyclers.’ Granted, the idea of having worms in your classroom might not be thrilling, but watching the worms turn rubbish into something useful should be engaging. If you wanted to take the experiment further you could set up composting bins for your class to use.

Make Sure That Things Are Switched Off

Forgetting to switch things off can waste a huge amount of energy. Encouraging children to do this at school will make your class room greener, and is a good way to get them into the habit of doing it at home.

A fun idea is to make a checklist of good energy saving habits such as, ‘turning off lights when you leave the room’. The children can tick things off the list as they get into the habit of doing them, and then be rewarded when they finish the checklist. Get creative and make posters to remind people to turn off lights. Kids Energy zone has some fun energy saving resources.

Make Lunch From Locally Sourced Produce

Locally sourced food has a number of benefits for the environment. Eating foods that are produced and sold locally, avoids the harmful effects that transporting and food packaging can have. Small, traditional farms also tend to have a much smaller harmful output than industrial agricultural facilities.

Visiting a local produce shop, and making lunch with your purchases is an interactive way to teach children about the benefits of local produce. You could also incorporate cooking and healthy eating skills to make the day more comprehensive.

Encourage Your Class To Walk To School

Your class can do their bit for the environment by walking to school. Walking to school cuts down on car emissions, and is great for keeping fit and healthy. This one isn’t for everyone, but if your class is old enough, and the walk to school is reasonably quick and safe, it could be a success.

Creating certificates to reward children who frequently walk to school is a good motivator. You could also create targets for children to aim for such as silver, bronze and gold certificates. The British Heart Foundation has a useful guide about walking to school.

So there you have it, taking care of the environment can be fun! Take a look at the School Stickers Summer Calendar to find out more about events you can get involved with this summer.

Win a year’s supply of personalised praise postcards for your school!

Enter the ‘Pride of Place Pupils’ Postcard Competition’ by asking your students to design their own postcards, showing off your local landmarks.

It could be a famous building like Buckingham Palace or the Millenium Stadium in Cardiff, a place of outstanding natural beauty like Lake Windermere or the Scottish Highlands, or a man-made structure like the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the Angel of the North or even Stonehenge. It may be somewhere less well-known nationally, but important locally; a landmark that your pupils are proud of, and want to share with the rest of the country.

The competition is split into three different age categories:

• 4-8 (school years 1, 2, 3 & 4)
• 8-12 (school years 5,6 & 7)
• 12-16 (school years 8,9 &10)

Entries must be received by midnight on the 14th June, 2013. Ten finalists will be selected by the team at School Stickers, at least two from each age category, and announced on the 21st June. Each finalist’s school will receive 150 copies of their postcard!

The winner will be announced on the 28th June, 2013, with their school receiving a year’s supply of praise postcards in their winning design!

Send your design and completed entry form to School Stickers, FREEPOST, RRYC-LXEC-YHUU, Birmingham, B7 4HJ.

Download your entry form

View Terms and Conditions

Click here to view the entries so far

(Photo by: Superkimbo)

The Future of Classroom Management

No prizes for guessing that the future of education will involve new forms of technology. The evolution of mobile phones and the Internet in just the last five years have made technology a standard fixture in all modern western cultures. So it comes as no surprise that Bill Gates doesn’t want schools to be left behind in all this. In his opinion, children will need to develop a relevant level of technological ability for when it’s their turn to enter the workforce. But will having to deal with constant updates and new gadgets affect a teacher’s ability to manage a classroom? Here are some of my predictions for the future of classroom management in the information age.

Teachers as Project Managers

With free online video conferencing tools such as Skype, teachers like Terry Smith take on a Project Management role in his classroom, aiding his class in collaborative projects with other schools. He believes that by harnessing technology, he can encourage his students to become self-directed learners who take pride and responsibility for their contribution to projects. His students in turn don’t want to let the side down. Besides, talking to pupils in other schools is a break from the norm and therefore a fun and engaging activity for pupils.

In taking on more of a project manager role in the classroom, Smith also had to become better acquainted with project management online tools like basecamp, where teachers and pupils communicate through profiles and message boards that bring the entire project work together. He reports that by managing his pupils’ work online, he has streamlined the meeting deadlines, handing in and feedback processes with pupils, freeing up more time for him to get involved with the complex planning stages of collaborative work. Using project management tools in this way ensures that every member of his class understands and internalises their role within the team, maximising learning potential all round.

Self-Directed Learners

It is believed that the pupils of the future will be thought of as self-directed learners who use devices like smartphones and tablets to engage with learning material at their own pace.  If, for example, you were studying a science module on your iPad then progression to the next module will be locked until you answer the set a set of questions correctly – sort of like moving up the levels of a computer game. This method will also allow students to access one-on-one help with the touch of a button, meaning that the caring, problem solving aspect of the teacher’s role may become a distant memory in favour of teachers becoming more like IT technicians with specialist skills instead.

Managing Digital and Social Networking

With every new piece of technology comes new ways in which pupils can get around parental or school imposed controls to access inappropriate material. Educators of the future will need to bear this in mind before they start handing out iPads to their students, and will need to come up with strict guidelines for dealing with pupils who breach the content rules in school.

However, I also think it’s equally important for educators to gain an understanding of how young people use social networking sites in their own time and give them coaching in appropriate online communications, which is fast becoming an important life skill in the 21^st century. Together pupils and teachers can come up with acceptable terms for using social networks appropriately within school hours, which ideally could pre-empt the rebellious mentality of some students looking to take advantage of the system by way of a few sneaky Tweets.

There’s no doubt that keeping up with technology will be a continuous challenge for many educators. But for now, here are some links to resources dealing with classroom management in the traditional schoolroom setting.

If you have any comments about the future role of the teacher, feel free to comment below.

(Photo by: Wikimedia commons)

Five Ways To Celebrate Shakespeare’s Birthday in Your Primary School

23rd April would have been Shakespeare’s birthday – his 449th to be precise – if he was still alive today. But even though old Billy Waggledagger is long gone, the legacy of his great works lingers on as millions of us still enjoy his plays and use the phrases he invented in our everyday speech; for example, ‘break the ice’, ‘green-eyed monster’, and even ‘fair play.’

Many primary school educators are wary of teaching Shakespeare to Key Stages one and two, for they fear the language to be too dense for younger children to grasp and some of the themes running through Shakespeare’s work may well be beyond the average comprehension levels of a 10-year-old. But methinks the lady doth protest too much; there are still plenty of ways primary school children can celebrate Shakespeare’s life and works. Here are some Shakespeare-inspired lesson plans to mark the occasion.

Figurative Language Games
Shakespeare was the king of figurative language (metaphor) and his plays read like a word association game played with everything in existence (simile and hyperbole). It is for this reason that using Shakespeare’s plays to introduce the concept of figurative language to primary school children will open them up to various magical ways language can be used to convey meaning.
Divide your class up into pairs and give them all a short passage of A Midsummer’s Night Dream to read. Get them to identify whether the language used is a metaphor, simile, personification, alliteration, hyperbole, onomatopoeia and so on, and get them to highlight the phrase using corresponding colours. After the exercise is complete, ask your class to think of examples of figurative language used in their favourite songs, books and TV shows and try to get them to think of the reasons why writers like Shakespeare would employ these techniques.
Watch an Adaptation
As an introduction to Shakespeare for primary school audiences, YouTube has a lot of Shakespeare play adaptations by the BBC specifically aimed at children. They’re shorter and animated, so hopefully your class will be able to grasp the themes of the story easily. Watch a film and discuss the themes of the play afterwards. You could then get the pupils to pick a character and create a mood board based around their character’s personality and plot journey.
Act Out Some Scenes
As well as animated adaptations, there are also abridged Shakespeare scripts aimed at children available online too. Pick up a script and get your class to act out a scene in small groups. Start a discussion about what Elizabethan theatres were like 450 years ago, and get them enthusiastic about performing. Alternatively, take them to a Shakespeare play or event dedicated to his memory, like a trip to the Globe Theatre.
Study the Sonnets
Write one of Shakespeare’s sonnets on the board and label the iambic pentameter rhyming scheme for each line (e.g. ABAB CDCD EFEF). Next explain how a sonnet is put together and get them to come up with their own sonnet about anything – what it’s like to be on holiday, for example. An easy way to get into the creative writing scheme of iambic pentameter is to get them to come up with the rhymes on the last lines first and work backwards. When they have the raw material, teach them how to edit it so it fits in the with the syllable pattern.
Read a Proper Passage
Take a scene from The Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream and read a monologue in full (pick an age appropriate scene, naturally). Now, even though your class aren’t likely to understand every single word in the passage, get them to close their eyes while they listen and see if they can pick up any images or phrases in the text. In essence, get the class to ‘translate’ Shakespeare with your assistance (only helping them with the really archaic terms). Get the children to then decorate a photocopied passage with all the images they saw. Get them to compare the mental images to the theme of the passage (e.g. jealousy) and drum the message home that all good writers ‘show’ emotions rather than ‘tell’ them. Then get your class to come up with their own pictures depicting images of poetic themes like jealousy. The more creative depictions of your chosen theme can earn themselves a class reward.

Shakespeare’s birthday is just one of the days of note listed on the School Stickers Spring Calendar, a great resource for activities based in learning opportunities, and more importantly fun!

Do you have any other Shakespeare related activities aimed at primary school children? Leave your thoughts in comments below.

With that in mind, here are half-a-dozen egg-based activities you can do with your class, to get them into the Easter spirit.

Make a Cress Egg Head

Growing cress is a fun and simple activity that can also teach children how to grow and look after plants. You will need one egg per child, kitchen roll, cotton wool, cress seeds and some felt tip pens. First of all, crack the egg two thirds of the way up and get rid of the insides, this will make up your base. Wash the inside of the egg and put some wet kitchen roll in larger half of the egg shell. Next, wet a small piece of cotton wool, put it on top of the kitchen roll and sprinkle with cress seed and sprinkle a tiny bit of water on top. Rest all of the eggs into egg cups or cartons and put them in a light and warm place. Get the children to sprinkle tiny amounts of water onto their egg every day and you will start to notice growth within two days. As the cress grows, get the children to give the eggs little faces and in about a week’s time your class’ egg heads will be fully grown (around 5cm tall) ready for you to trim.

Egg Painting

Decorated eggs look fabulous hanging from a branch of twigs, as part of an Easter display. The easiest method for decorating eggs is to blow out the insides and paint them with water-based poster paints. You can also try dying hard-boiled eggs with food colouring, but for ease in the classroom, I think decorating blown eggs works best. You may want to do all of the egg clearing yourself, as the eggs can easily break at the blowing stage. First take a needle and make a small hole in the top and bottom of the egg, you will need to pierce it around three or four times to make the holes big enough. Next take your needle and pierce the yolk in the middle, you may want to give it a hand by plugging both holes with your fingers and give the egg a big ol’ shake. Next blow out all of the innards by placing your mouth around the top of the egg, this bit can be tricky and you may feel your ears pop, but keep blowing until the egg is completely empty. Leave it to dry and all soak out then thread ribbon through the holes, for hanging, and your eggs are now ready to paint.

Paper Mache Easter Chicks

With your blown eggs, you can also try making little egg-shaped chicks out of Paper Mache. Cover the blown eggs with PVA glue and layers of coloured tissue paper strips, wait for it to dry and then stick on little wings, beaks and feet made out of cardboard and then add some googly eyes and tail feathers.

Egg and Spoon Race

To add a variation to the typical Sport’s Day Egg and Spoon Race, make the challenge a bit harder for the kids, to build their motor skills. Hard boil the eggs beforehand or use plastic ones and make an obstacle course for children to conquer. Give them things to step over or crawl under and get them to push the egg for a stretch using their nose, elbows or shoulders.

Easter Egg Hunt

Easter egg hunts are lots of fun and easy to adapt to suit larger groups of children. First, divide your group into teams of three or four and assign them each a colour. These colours will correspond to the hidden eggs in the playground or dotted around the classroom and it will be the job of each team to find all their coloured eggs first. Keep a record of where you hid all the eggs, so at the end you can double check for the lost ones. You may also want to design a hunt with cryptic clues that lead to the eggs, this can be done easily if you start with the very last clue and work backwards. The team who recovers all of their eggs first, earns a small reward.

Egg Toss

This simple egg tossing quiz game can be adapted to suit any school subject. For materials you will need an egg carton, coloured card, pens and small, egg-shaped chocolates. Cut your egg carton into 12 pieces, spread them out over a large piece of card and tape them down. Next label each carton piece with a different number or category, then the children can take it in turns to try and throw the little chocolates into the egg baskets. If they are successful, give them a corresponding category question and if they get it right they get their sweet.

What other Easter egg activities have you tried with your class? Share Below

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