Mantle of the Expert - Let the students be the teachers Part 1!

I have always found with older year groups in the school that by adding a sense of responsibility to their work it always has a more positive outcome.

With some tasks I have set the children I give a purpose for their work by adding it is something I want to show younger children in the school to help them with their learning or for people visiting the school, prospective parents, special visitors for example. This always means the children approach the work with a more mature attitude. It is giving the task a sense of worth and turning the children into teachers. Using the iPads give children the perfect opportunity to showcase this through some excellent speaking and listening opportunities.

With my class last year we had a focus 'sentence of the week.' These sentences are from the  fantastic Alan Peat book "Writing Exciting Sentences," in the two years since investing in the excellent resources by Alan I have seen a massive improvement in the children's ability to write and express themselves using some really interesting and varied sentences. The level of writing has dramatically improved and we cannot praise the ideas Alan provides for teaching Literacy. The children's ability to improve their writing by using some of these ideas have been extraordinary and the children feel so confident sharing their knowledge, so we put this to the test.

I set the children the challenge, can you persuade other children to incorporate these exciting sentences into their writing?

We first looked at adverts and how these help persuade people to believe or buy something. 

What I found this exercise did really well was that it gave the children a chance to showcase their understanding of these sentence types, could they clearly explain how to use and put one together? Could they use persuasive techniques to convince others? Could they apply their ICT skills to edit the video together? I was really pleased with the children's responses.

Once the children had finished all their filming using the camera app, we used iMovie to edit our films and put the different clips together, some were able to add credits however we were tight for time so not all were able to. iMovie is probably the most child friendly video editing app around. It has easy to use functions for normal video editing while a brilliant trailer option that allows you to create some really interesting film trailers.

I also quickly introduced the "Action Movie FX" app. A really useful app to spark children's imaginations by adding movie style FX onto a normal video. Children were able to blow up their boring sentences before making it super! This was a real 'wow' factor to the videos, the children absolutely loved seeing their work up in flames before making it better.

Here are their efforts and I hope you are persuaded to include some of these sentences in your writing! (Apologies about the American accents! I don't know why the class are obsessed with speaking like our friends across the pond when it comes to Drama)

5B Super Sentences adverts from Davyhulme Primary School on Vimeo.

5A Super Sentences adverts from Davyhulme Primary School on Vimeo.