Writing a school trip diary

This is a neat little exercise that I've done with my 5th year class to work on their speaking skills and then to follow on with their writing skills.

We went on a school trip to visit 3 local sites linked to the St James Highway, Eunate, Viana and Los Arcos. The children had worksheets to complete as they visited the different sites and while we were there I took lots of photos.

In class when we return, I show the photos and we brainstorm other words and verbs and put them into a wordcloud. Then the children have to select 8 photos and write sentences about their day.



It's an excelent exercise as they want to talk about what they did, it's far more real and relevant than exercises from a book.

As a demostration, I've put some of these into a ppt and created a word cloud with sample key vocabulary and past tense verbs they will need to describe their day out. I've loaded the ppt and wordcloud into slideshare and embedded it below.

School trip

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Listening to instructions

This is an exercise I’ve prepared for my 5th year primary class. It’s a listening exercise using "voice-thread" to review directions. You can use a far simpler version without directions just using the numbers of the squares to work listening for numbers (2nd -4th year primary). Here as I’m working with 5th year, we’re making it more complex and they have to follow directions from the black reference square.

If you click on the image it will take you to the voicethread exercise



We’ve done similar exercises in class so the students are used to this kind of exercise. Once you have the grid, you can record lots of different instructions, making it simpler or more difficult as you require.

Each student has a copy of the grid and a link to the voice-thread so that they can listen to the instructions. They know to pause the listening exercise as often as they want and they can listen as often as they want. The students have to follow the instructions, drawing or writing the correct things in the corresponding boxes.

They love it!

The writing is on the wall...

A big thanks to David who told me about this message wall. It's called "Wallwisher". Again, it's super easy to use and very simple to get started. You can register using your gmail account or set up a wallwisher account (just give your email. a "nick-name" and a password for the site, and you can build your message wall, select a background, give it a title and get posting!

It's really easy and good fun to use. I'm already using it with my 5th year class to exchange ideas and to post information about class activities and exams.
You can set it so that anyone can post on the wall, which is great for exchanging ideas;or so that you as the author is the only person who can post/authorise new posts. This is better if it is for posting information about homework they have to do!

The picture below shows how I've set a message board up for my 5th years. If you click on the image it will take you to the page but please don't post a message!