Use the gallery to teach spellings

I would love to claim this idea as my own, but it belongs to Emma Goto, a colleague of mine and an excellent Key Stage 1 practitioner (4-7year olds).

She has set up a gallery and in this gallery, she has put the alphabet as individual items. This could be found online, done using Wordart or similar or better yet, why not get the children to design the letters?

This gallery is then put into a topic or theme area. The example I am using is in an area where the children are learning all about the seaside. When the children click on each letter, the teacher has put some words in the comment boxes. These are words that are linked to their topic and will help to encourage the children to build up their online wordbank/dictionary for use throughout their topic work.Why not get the children to put the words that they find in there too? Can they find words for every letter? I am stuck when looking for an ‘x’ word related to the seaside!!

Ian Addison

Learning Platform Consultant, Hampshire

@ianaddison

Students Engaged

Hello. This is Regina again, updating information about my iPod/Studywiz study. After one week, we asked our students what they thought about the iPod. Did they see it as a study tool, or was it honestly, just a bit of a fun toy and status symbol? Did they find it useful or was it just one more device to carry around besides their phone. Was it just one more thing to remember in the evenings, getting it charged up and ready to go?

I expected a balanced response to these questions but I was really surprised at the overwhelming enthusiasm the students shared. One student claimed she felt really confident that her vocabulary, understanding and pronunciation had become better in just one week because she was playing with a whole variety of educational tools on the iPod. Another felt his translation and vocabulary was massively better because he sheepishly admitted that he was addicted to one of the Spanish Vocabulary games. Another felt her understanding of the text was better because she was listening to the audio over and over again and she was watching the video with the same audio and this also helped her understanding of the lesson passage.

Students in this photo are working together on verb tenses and translations.