Hooray for Roald Dahl

We’ve been rereading ‘The Twits’ and the BFG this half term. Dipped into Matilda and Boy too.
Interesting piece by Will Self in today’s Guardian.

Tails of the unexpected
Roald Dahl’s children’s books are full of barely submerged misogyny, lust and violence. The new film version of Fantastic Mr Fox is an ideal introduction to this fabulous, cruel [...]

Pie’s (now where does that apostrophe go?) the man!

In ten years of being a late trained Primary teacher, I’ve struggled with the seemingly impossible demands of the Literacy and Numeracy Strategy. As I think I’ve alluded to before the Literacy Strategy has caused more heartache and lost sleep than numeracy but then I haven’t got A level English but an engineering background. I’ve [...]

Digital Starters

A brilliant post from Simon Mills about using Wallace & Gromit videos as digital starters for explaining processes.

The Tellyscope
The Snoozatron
There is an ongoing list of ‘Digital Starters’ or Multimodal Starting Points which can be found on our school site – E-Learning – English – Film

24 Ideas for Inspiring writing

A Google Docs presentation
24 Ideas for Inspiring Writing
from Mark Warner.
Also a new website

Passion for poetry

A few choice words from the Guru by David Ward
An article about Cliff Yates ideas for poetry teaching.
Cliff Yates from the Poetry Class – This is just to say
Poetry Class “taking the fear out of teaching poetry”
National Poetry Day on October 9th – here

Teaching Storytelling

A little bit of “Myst”

From a 100 Awesome Classroom Videos – here

Comics anyone?

I’d always liked the idea of creating comics with children. There’s a great piece of software (Comic Life) that John Johnston at Sandaig has used but it’s Mac only.
Look at their latest Sports Day Comics here.
I saw this piece yesterday from Mr Kp and now there’s a web2.0 site called Comiqs that does the same [...]

Guided writing on Teacher’s TV

First in a series of three about guided writing.

The Crazy Professor

A loud and lively video highlighted by ‘The Cool Cat Teacher Blog.’

OnLine Graphical Dictionary