Maths Workbooks: Ordinal Numbers and Tallying

I have recently added 2 workbooks to TES for you to download, one is Tallying, the other Ordinal numbers, great for you high P level students and they are supported with Widgit symbols throughout. The Tallying workbook has a Chinese New Year slant to it and the ordinal numbers booklet is more generic...so have a look and try them out with your class.

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Tallying-Workbook-6168589/

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Ordinal-Numbers-Workbook-6168755/

Enjoy!

English Text Work: Key Words Chatter Mat

Here is the TES link to the Chatter mat I added today - It is a key word mat for text work which has 8 key terms such as word, letter, top, bottom, front, back for reference when working with texts. Ideal for P8 reading objectives (for those of you who use B2) and it is in PDF format.

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/English-Key-Text-Words-Chatter-mat-6170825/

Enjoy!

Geography: Chinese display

And it's complete!

Each week we have added a new element to our display and here it is:

Chinese blossom, dragons, koi carp and lastly...the sensory map...enjoy!

Geography: sensory map

The sensory map is great for any cultural units. Out theme this half term was china, therefore in geography each week we have taken a different symbol of china and investigated it. This week we looked at Chinese food which linked to our food technology units.

We had 10 dried foods: green tea, cherry tea, seaweed, star anise, ba Wang flowers, noodles, rice, wolf berry, black fungi and (the stinkiest) dried anchovies.

We started in circle time by smelling and feeling the products then moved onto some group work. Each group had 5 foods to stick on the map, while 1 group was sticking the other group was filling in thumbs up and thumbs down questionnaire to assess if they liked or disliked the smell and feel of all 10 foods! Great activity because the non smelly foods had great textures and the other foods either smelt awesome or absolutely disgusting!

Just be warned your room will stink of fish if you use dried fish but it's so worth it!

Check out the pictures...

Oh...if your doing this for a display like myself make sure you PVA over the top...otherwise your inquisitive students may end up with a mouthful!

The completed map along with Widgit symbols

Clockwise from the right: Wolfberry, Seaweed, Green Tea, Ba Wang Flowers and Star Anise

Dried Anchovies (they stink!)

Seaweed and Noodles

Chinese Koi Carp Display

Yesterday we looked at our third symbol of China, we've had blossom and dragons and now some impressive koi carp! This activity was just short enough to keep the attention span of the class and looks really effective. I introduced it with familiar Chinese objects again and we watched a video of koi carp and talked about why they are symbolic of China. Then got to the good stuff...the art...what do you think, feel free to leave me a comment!

It looks very impressive as a whole display but each element on its own looks good all the same.
Check back next week for the last element and the final unveiling of the China display as a whole!!

Chatter mats

I have uploaded some chatter mats onto the TES website which may be useful. Chatter mats are great to print off and use to aid in group work opportunities but also great for circle time discussion and they are all PDF's with widgit symbols! Here are some for the topics we have been covering:

Science - Light: where it comes from - http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Light-and-Dark-Chatter-Mat-6167140/

Science - Changing textures: 5 minute microwave chocolate cake (also with an instruction powerpoint which is SEN friendly) - http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Science-Changing-textures-5-minute-microwave-cake-6167147/

PSHE - Smoothie making partner activity - http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/One-blend-smoothie-friend-PSHE-chatter-Mat-6167146/

Science - Materials - http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Science-Materials-Chatter-Mat-6167145/

English - Chinese New Year: Animals - http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Chinese-New-Year-Story-Animals-Chatter-Mat-6167137/

History - Kings and Queens: War of the roses - http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/History-Kings-and-Queens-Chatter-Mat-6167138/

Geography - Chinese Luck Symbols - http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Chinese-Luck-symbols-Chatter-Mat-6167141/

Also in addition here is the link for the original Sam Maxwell Chatter Mat pack... http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Lunchtime-Chatter-Mats-Widget-6108579/

Enjoy!

Chinese Handprint dragon

Great idea for any Chinese New Year display work you have planned. As part of our Geography project each week we are looking at a different aspect of Chinese culture. This week we made two dragons, a giant dragon body (which is yet to have a head) which I will post a picture of soon, and a great little hand print dragon for a display, which has drawn a lot of attention on the corridor!

My students loved it because it was messy and very tactile but at the same time we were able to think about what a dragons body may be like, it could have scales which are represented by the hand prints and we chose colours at represented china by looking at a range of different artifacts. I then crafted a head for the display.

Not a bad job I wouldn't say!

English PowerPoints for Chinese New Year, Nature and Africa Themes

I have uploaded some PowerPoints to the TES website which you can go and download to use for your English projects.

Firstly...The Chinese New Year story, I made this PowerPoint using communicate in print, it has a shortened version of the story at the bottom of each page with a self made picture to illustrate the text above which was also made using communicate in print. You can find it here...

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/The-Race-Chinese-New-Year-Story-PowerPoint-6164254/

Secondly... Last year I made a Lion King PowerPoint for a literacy project about Africa using images from a book. It has come colour coordinated slides, green for when the text indicates something good is happening and red for the bad things. You can find it here...

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/The-Lion-King-Powerpoint-6164485/

Lastly...we also made a PowerPoint for the story 'After the storm' by Nick Butterworth, which was for the theme of nature. This uses scanned pictures from the book so it isn't quite as inventive as the other but is always there for you to use! You can find it here...

http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/After-the-storm-Nick-Butterworth-6164487/

Enjoy!!

Chinese New Year display

So being Chinese New Year this half term our theme of 'Oriental' which is actually a pretty great theme!

Today we started to look at China as a culture and in particular Chinese cherry blossom, we are going to looking at the Chinese new year story 'the great race' so I started our display today. We made a 3D cherry blossom tree by stringing together tissue paper 'blossom' like you would do with popcorn, it made a pretty great effect. For students who have the fine motor skills to be able to do it this is a great activity, very simple, very repetitive but very enjoyable.

For those who were not physically able to do this we made some lovely blossom pictures which will be mounted and displayed later on in the half term. We stenciled the branch on and then simple applied the blossom with scrunched up tissue paper, the effect was really great!

Special People and Winter displays

In the second half term of this year it was all about Christmas...well actually no it wasn't we only had 2 weeks of Christmas. Firstly we were talking about Special People as a theme.

Art was great, students were able to make some fantastic photo frames but I don't have any pictures of theme...sorry.

BUT...we did look at King and Queens, we did a great reenactment of the war of the roses in the playground, but firstly to highlight the two houses we made two emblems, one white for the house of York, one red for the house of Lancaster. We also made some 'tags' which you can see down the side of the display, these were for our reenactment: each team had to grab the tag of the other team, if someone grabbed your tag then you were out, the last colour to be left in the game wins. Lancaster or York?? try it out and see!

We also made some swords with foil and sandpaper as part of a history/science project about materials.

So like I said...it wasn't all Christmas but we did enjoy a bit of winter fun with this display...We made a frost display about our whiteboard with loads of different tactile materials and some lights. We have tinsel (very Christmassy, some cheap battery lights from ikea, some snowflake decorations and loads of different tactile materials to frame it down the side! Take a look

It looks even better with the room lights off and the fairy lights on...this isn't the best example...my flash was on!

And here you can see the types of tactile materials we used down the side to frame it all...

we had an abundance of lace and furry white fabric but the best by far was the bubble wrap...everyone loves to pop bubble wrap whatever your age! And for any students you may have in wheelchairs what a fantastic sound it makes when you run over it!

Noah's Ark and Weather Autumn displays

Here are some of the displays we did in our first half term of 2011-12. Our theme was weather so what better story to study than 'Noah's Ark'. We made a lovely display which linked to maths:

We made clouds with loads of different tactile materials including, fabric, netting, cotton wool, wool and felt. Our collage waves also acted as a number line which can be used for rote counting and as a reference for maths counting activities.

For lower level students the letter raindrops also acted as a number line, however this time just up to 8, the raindrops rotate which means students can use them to 'fill in the missing number'.

Also as part of our weather theme our art teacher made a great weather map of Yorkshire. The map is a collage and all of the weather symbols were made by students and then laminated, they were then stuck on the map, however they are interchangeable as they were stuck on using velcro. In the last lesson students were able to create different effects using pencil crayons to make a header.