Thinglink for Non Chronological Reports

This week is Creative Arts Week at school. My Year 6 class are going to look at poet Benjamin Zephaniah. Before we delve into his poems and perform some ourselves, we are going to learn about his background, beliefs and what makes him passionate about writing.

We are going to create a non-chronological report about him but I want it to reflect his passion for creativity and multimedia, so we are going to use the app Thinglink.

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/495336546740731905

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/502225511313833985

I used Pic Collage to create the picture using words as subheadings related to the pictures. I then used this in Thinglink to add other text about him, video of his poems and other pictures which show his work in more detail.

Super Reading

It seems that this year's KS2 Reading SAT will be a whistle stop tour through various texts in an hour. No savouring a piece of excellent prose or reflecting upon the delights of a well executed simile, it's skim reading time!

To prepare my children for this, I decided to use a range of text excerpts which they read in class, I gave them a time limit of 5 minutes and they then had to summarise the text in 3 sentences. This helped them to find the main points of the text, explain themselves succinctly and experience a range of texts over a short space of time.

The next step, would be to use the excellent classtools.net http://www.classtools.net/twister/

Fake Tweet application to write a summary of the text in the 140 characters permitted. My children enjoyed it and it was far more bearable than yet another practice test.