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Showing posts from 2017

Mr P's Top Ten Videos of 2017

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Earlier this week, I did a Facebook live video sharing my top 5 apps of the year. You can watch it here. It made me reflect on 2017 and what an amazing year it has been. Especially when it comes to my social media channels. It has been a year where the videos I make about life as a teacher have had such an amazing response from you guys. I thought I would compile a top ten list of videos from my page based on views from Facebook, I hope you enjoy: 10 - What would Love Island look like in a Primary School Staffroom? 383k Views 9 - Teacher One-Liners 384k views Check out more teacher one-liners here. 8 - Teachers in Summer 523k views 7 - Different Teachers in a Singing Assembly 623k views 5 - Things Teachers Never Say When Writing Reports - 634k Views There are a number of other - Things Teachers Never Say Videos, including: Things Teachers Never Say When SATs are over Things Teachers Never Say in the last weeks before Summer Thin

Mr P's Top 5 Apps of 2017

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So as 2017 comes to an end, it is time to reflect on the past year. For me, it has been another incredible year. The support and feedback I have received from teachers all over the world has been amazing. There are still huge issues in education and 2017 hasn't been the best year for schools, especially in the UK. However, it is my mission to change that, take teaching back and get schools working smarter, not harder. I decided to do a LIVE Vlog on my facebook page tonight to share my top 5 apps in 2017. These aren't necessarily the best apps, I have picked them based on which apps I have used the most in the classroom this year. Here is the whole video which also talks about John Murray's new book - Reading Rocketeers.  So here are links to the apps mentioned: 5 - iVisualiser -  Along with Airserver.com, this tool can transform your teaching by turning your iPad into a mobile Visualiser. To find out more, check out this blog post I put together - click here

Mr P's Talent Show Entry 2017

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One of my favourite days of the school year has to be our Christmas dinner day. Not only is the food always immense, we spend the afternoon doing an annual talent show. I've had the pleasure of hosting the talent show for the past few years and have always treated the pupils to a little surprise at the end. I say 'surprise' but as this is the 8th year or so that we have done it, I think the children expect it now. Anyway, this year we decided to make a teacher's version of one of the biggest songs of the year - Mans Not Hot. As much as the students love it, I wanted to share a message that hopefully will resonate with a lot of teachers too. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to share. I will take this opportunity to say a massive thank you for continuing to support the blog, my social media pages and my CPD and conferences. 2017 has been an incredible year, and 2018 is shaping up to be just as good if not better. I hope everyone has a wonderful and restful

Reporting from the scene of the Great Fire of London

We recently discovered the Read Write Perform has now been used in over 2000 schools around the world. This is incredible! For a fairly new approach, to see it grow so quickly has been amazing. The best part is the positive feedback we receive from teachers, who say it has revolutionised the way in which they teach English. At present, there are 10 packs, we have mapped out around 30+ to hopefully get to a point where schools could do a pack a half term from year 1-6. Unfortunately, due to the amount of detail and quality that goes into the packs, they take a while to write. However, we love how teachers are now innovating on the approach. After trying one of the teaching packs, teachers and schools understand the pedagogy behind the approach and now use the overview to plan their English. This includes some of the teachers in my school. So Year 2 have been writing newspaper articles about the Great Fire of London. Using the ReadWritePerform approach, the children then performed the

Remembrance Day Activities

Although Remembrance Day has passed, I wanted to share a couple of activities we did across our school to learn about this important and significant day. In KS1, the pupils created videos using the fantastic Adobe Spark Video app to share their knowledge and understanding about Armistice Day; how it happened and how we remember it. Here is one of their examples: In KS2, the pupils created greenscreen videos as paperboys sharing the news about the end of the Great War. Brilliant little task which challenged the children to think about abstraction and constraints with their writing. They had to be paper boys spreading the news about Armistice day. The challenge was to grab people’s attention but it had to be short, almost speak in headlines. The boys in the video would love to hear what you think, so please leave them a comment!  Watch this space, as this will be developed into a READWRITEPERFORM pack soon.  As a whole school, we created a Padlet wall for fami

Improving Oral Speaking in EYFS/KS1 through Digital Storytelling

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One of the best ways in which I use iPad in the classroom is to encourage and improve student's speaking and listening. In a culture of teaching, where we are so accountable to prove what we have done in books, I fear we do not develop young children's oral speaking skills. In my opinion, if a child cannot talk you through a story, I don't believe they can effectively write one. So over the past few weeks, I have been using one of my favourite apps - Puppetpals HD Directors Pass , to improve and develop children oral storytelling. The app, which I have enjoyed using for a number of years, allows pupils to add pictures of characters alongside background and record their own cartoon. It lends itself brilliantly to so many different areas of the curriculum. Working with Reception over the past few weeks, we have focused on using it to allow pupils retell stories they have been reading in class. Here are a couple of recent projects the students have created: The Tiger Who

I Love The Power Of The Internet!

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This is something I share a lot on my training. I explain how, as teachers, we need to embrace the internet and demonstrate how to use it safely. I also demonstrate how when utilised in the right way, it can have an incredible impact on children's learning. I have previously blogged plenty of examples where the internet has enhanced our learning in class and the experiences my pupils have had from it.  This week I've had a much more personal example of how incredibly powerful the internet is. A close family friend is currently undergoing a lot of treatment to battle Leukemia. Rather than me tell you all about her battle, here is our superstar Emmie talking all about her current illness: Now before Emmie was diagnosed with this illness, my wife had managed to get tickets for her and her Mum to attend the Little Mix concert in Manchester alongside my wife and daughter. Everyone was really looking forward to seeing their favourite band perform. Unfortunately, ov

Mr P's Round Up of Christmas Adverts - 2017

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So it is that time of year again and already our TVs are flooded with different adverts. Over the past few years, I have blogged a number of ways to use some of the more popular adverts in class, which you can read here: Mr P's round-up of Christmas Adverts 2016 Developing Emotional Literacy through a great Christmas Advert John Lewis Christmas Advert 2015 John Lewis Christmas Advert 2014 Sainsbury's Christmas Advert 2014 So as Christmas is all about traditions, here are some ideas for this year's adverts. Before I start I must mention some other resources worth checking out. Firstly, the Christmas Letter ReadWritePerform Pack: There is also my eBook - The 12 iPad lessons of Christmas which you can download by clicking the picture: So let's start with the most popular - John Lewis and their Moz the Monster advert: Now as the advert doesn't have any text, John Lewis has provided a book to work alongside the advert. You can grab a

Reading Comprehension through Harry Styles

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I love using music in the classroom for a number of reasons. I have previously blogged about using songs for comprehension and you can read about them here - CLICK HERE. After listening to the latest song released by Harry Styles, 'Two Ghosts' is definitely a song you could use and discuss with your pupils. Here is a lyric video: I would first play the song all the way through and ask the children what the song is about - It is about a relationship ending and both leaving as very different people.  Then consider the lyrics in more detail: Same lips red, same eyes blue, Same white shirt, couple more tattoos, But it's not you and it's not me, Tastes so sweet, looks so real, Sounds like something that I used to feel, But I can't touch what I see. We're not who we used to be, We're not who we used to be, We're just two ghosts standing in the place of you and me, Trying to remember how it feels to have a heartbeat. Consid

Reflecting on #ReadingRocks - The Power of talking about Books

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There was a lot I took away from #ReadingRocks_17 last week. The keynotes from  @TeresaCremin  reminded me of how important Reading for Pleasure really is. As she stated, the research shows Reading for Pleasure has the biggest impact on children's success when they grow up. The website she mention ResearchRichPedagogies , has some great information for how to promote Reading for Pleasure in your school. These awesome sketch notes from @Cazzash picked up the main points from her keynote: Realised the original photo is a bit blurred. pic.twitter.com/0LtXRgFW2h — Caroline Ash (@cazzash) October 14, 2017 It was the same with @MaryMyatt's keynote, a lot to think about echoing a similar message. Again here is another sketchnote from @Cazzash: That was fantastic @MaryMyatt #ReadingRocks_17 @_Reading_Rocks_ pic.twitter.com/ZFq9cpcHrx — Caroline Ash (@cazzash) October 14, 2017 A big message from the day was emphasising how important it is for teachers to be

A Class Read for ReadWritePerform's Storm Pack

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The latest ReadWritePerform teaching pack is now available: The Storm: A Personification Pack challenges your students to read and deconstruct texts describing a storm, then write their own description and perform it as an interactive multimedia eBook. The writing focuses on developing personification and multi-sensory description to bring the storm to life in the reader's mind. Along with John's exemplar text, we also use the brilliant book - The Mousehole Cat written by Antonia Barber and illustrated by Nicola Bayley. This is the stunningly illustrated story of the seaside village of Mousehole Cornwall, where Mowzer the cat lives happily with old fisherman Tom - Tom who rocks the rocking chair just right, and catches fresh fish for dinner every night. Their life is a happy one - until one terrible winter, the Great Storm-Cat comes clawing and snarling and leaping at the harbour walls, so that no boat can go out to sea to fish. Soon, with Christmas coming, there is

My Workshop at Reading Rocks

I had a wonderful time on Saturday at The District CofE Primary School at the second Reading Rocks conference. I want to thank Heather and the staff for all their hard work organising a fantastic event. I was very lucky to be able to host a workshop all about ReadWritePerform . You can see my workshop and how the RWP approach works: I was also very lucky to be interviewed as part of  @RussellPrue 's live radio broadcast. You can listen to the interview here: It was nice to have the opportunity to sit and listen to other inspiring keynotes and drop into  @SmithSmm 's brilliant workshop. What was great how the messages from the keynotes and workshop I attended complimented the key messages from my workshop.

Combining PE and Maths with AR Runner and Graphmented

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One of the most exciting new features of Apple's iOS11 is the new ARKit and the possibilities with this new feature. The downside, as I discovered last week, the new AR apps will only work on devices with A9 or A10 chips. After installing these apps on most of our school devices, I quickly discovered they didn't work and had to change my plans quickly.  My Year 6 digital leaders did, however, get to try these apps out on my iPad. First, they started with the app AR Runner . The app used AR to create checkpoints which you run to as a way to complete different challenges. It is a great way to combine technology with PE as the children are timed when completing the challenges. Word of warning though, make sure you have decent cases on your iPads as no doubt there will be a few accidents when your pupils are into the game.  The Year 6 pupils all had a few attempts of completing a challenge and collated their scores on a Google Sheet.  Using another Augmente

Learning About The Human Body In Year 1

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Year 1 are learning all about the human body. Today, we used technology to enhance this topic further. First, we used the brillaint Virtuali-tee app from Curiscope. Click here to read more about this app . To order a t-shirt, click here. Year 1 loved learning about the human body today through Augmented Reality! Thank you @curiscope_official! A post shared by Lee Parkinson (@ict_mrp) on Oct 12, 2017 at 9:24am PDT Once we had explored and discussed the different parts of our body, the children all took turns wearing a green t-shirt and used the camera to photograph each other. They pupils then used Doink Greenscreen to create a picture that looked like we could see inside their body. Once the pupils had uploaded their pictures to Seesaw, we used the explain and reflect tool in Seesaw to label the major organs.  Finally, with the help of our Digital Leaders, some children were able to record a video explaining how some of our organs work, see the

How Teachers Walk Down The School Corridor

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Are you guilty of any of these?

A Class Read for ReadWritePerform's Picture Postcard Pack

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The latest ReadWritePerform pack - Wish You Were Here: The Picture Postcard Pack - is now available to download. This Unit of Work is aimed specifically at Key Stage 1 but can be adapted for lower Key Stage 2. Through reading, deconstructing and then writing a postcard of a recent holiday, children will then perform their postcard as a greenscreen video and link it through Augmented Reality to create an interactive video postcard. Each app has a step-by-step guide for teachers who may feel less confident using the technology. The aim is to cover all elements of the English curriculum in an engaging and purposeful way using a variety of media. Here is a snippet of the final piece of work your pupils will create through using the pack: Within the pack, we recommend some books that complement the pack really well. We recommend you using these as your class read as there are many links between the pack and the books. Meerkat Mail - Meerkat Mail is a brill

Descriptosaurus - The Perfect Christmas Present For A Teacher

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About 3 years ago, my fantastic Deputy gave every teacher this book - Descriptosaurus.  Written by Alison Wilcox, Descriptosaurus is fantastic for creative writing that is a thematic expansion of a dictionary and a thesaurus. It provides children with a comprehensive resource with which to expand their descriptive vocabulary, experiment with language and sentence structure and build up narratives based around the following areas: Settings - landscapes, settlements and atmosphere, Characters - appearance, emotions and personality, and Creatures - appearance, abilities and habitats. When it comes to writing, teachers can find it tricky to generate effective descriptive language during shared or guided writing sessions. I have been lucky enough to attend training by Alan Peat and Pie Corbett. Both sessions were fantastic and made it look so easy to generate effective vocabulary to tell a good story. They are geniuses and experts in the field. When faced with a class of 30, being put on

A Class Read for ReadWritePerform's Crazy Creatures Pack

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Recently. we discovered this amazing book that would complement our recent teaching pack - Crazy Creatures . This Unit of Work is aimed specifically at Key Stage 1 but can be adapted for lower Key Stage 2. Through reading, researching and then writing an information text about a chosen animal, children will create their own Crazy Creature Fact File. The aim is to cover all elements of the English curriculum in an engaging and purposeful way using a variety of media. It also aims to foster within children their love of the natural world and help them to understand their role and responsibility to it. Sloth Slept On is a picture book all about a group of children who find a sloth snoring away in a tree in their garden. Not knowing what it is, they set out to find out. While the two older children dream up increasingly outrageous possibilities, from an astronaut to a pirate, to a space creature, the youngest little girl investigates books and a globe and discovers what it r