Ted Talks:Temple Grandin

The world needs all kinds of minds

Teaching to a student's interest : Now CDs

The 'Now CDs' are quite popular with my students.
I've discovered that there is a website devoted to the NOW CD series which is well worth a visit.




At the top of the home page is a link to each year (beginning with 1983).
The Cd covers are featured and include song titles and track length .
There is also an online quiz about the Now CD series
I've used the CD covers to make a bingo game.This has helped with reading numbers to 74.
I've also created a Now 39 Comprehension E1 worksheet (available on the TES web site)

Making a film

We have started a new stop motion animation film . Our first job was to develop a story line. This needed some skill development so I started the process by using individual cartoon pictures from Comix Strips


There is an online Comic strip maker but I printed off individual pictures from the printables section (staff scribed for the students) -They just had to come up with the ideas.







Our next step was to create our own comic strip.This would help the students understand the importance of a story.
Under the 'direction' of a Learning Assistant the students created a story in 5 simple photographs e.g students want to play some music, they all have different ideas- when the music comes on its too loud- It gets turned down and everyone is happy.... We then made a PowerPoint- (we collaborated by viewing the Power Point on a large screen) and added dialogue. We were all very pleased with the result. This week we started on creating a story board for our film.



I followed the hints given on Making Stop Motion Movies. The Story board section suggested a structure which begins with the elements of the story followed by character development and finally creating the story board.
To finish we watched a 10 minute film suggested by Making Stop Motion Movies
Frog and Toad Behind the scenes
Also see my other blog entries on animation.

Fair Trade Fortnight and Every Student Matters

Fair Trade fortnight offers the opportunity to embed some discussion of ethical shopping and cover the Every Student Matters curriculum.
For Fairtrade Fortnight, Oxfam, Cafédirect and the Fairtrade Foundation are offering a swap of a bag of quality donations for a box of Cafédirect tea.
Find out more here

Oxfam are also suggesting you can to join in the Fairtrade Fortnight celebrations by Holding a Cafédirect Tea Party. Cafédirect have created a Tea Party Kit that you can download from their website with recipes and ideas for your party.

The five themes of Every Student Matters:
1) Being healthy 2) Staying safe 3) Enjoying and achieving 4) Making a positive contribution 5) Achieving economic well-being

Planting Seeds

Seed planting has begun.
The Gardening Family Learning Pack is a resource from Liverpool Community Learning which has a 2 page picture guide to planting seeds in a pot (pages 8 and 9)
The resource is hosted on the Talent website. (Registration is free)






For further gardening resources see my blog entries on Gardening

Get rewarded for sharing your resources

The Times Educational Supplement has an offer which runs until February 28th 2010. For every 3 SEN resources you upload to the TES site you receive a £10.00 voucher to spend at specialneedstoys.com.
The website says each 'school' is limited to £500.
For further details visit the TES website.

A report from NIACE

In recent years it has no longer been good enough to maintain the skills of students with learning disabilities.Teachers in F.E. have had to show that students are progressing . No doubt this has stopped the issue of the perpetual students returning to college year after year but it has also limited the learning provision for some students.
NIACE has recently published a report in which it found that nearly one-in-five (19 per cent) of Learning and Skills Council (LSC) funded learning providers reduced opportunities for adult learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities between 2006 and 2008.

The report

Impact of Changes in Provision on People with Learning Difficulties and/or Disabilities Post 19

highlights how providers were increasingly making changes in their offer to ensure their provision met the LSC's focus on learning leading to progression. They also stopped courses considered to be of low quality and focused instead on areas of strength rather than opting for a very broad curriculum offer.


You can read about the findings in detail on the NIACE website

Healthy Lunchboxes

BBC News has an article comparing healthy and unhealthy lunch boxes


There is also an interactive activity from the Food Standards Agency
Make a healthy lunchbox

. Here are two resources to help in the discussion about healthy foods


Five a Day is a PDF available to download from TES

Sugar Stacks is a website where you can compare amounts of sugar in different foods. Lots of pictures

Free time activities on the computer

Here are three example of visual start pages. In these pages each picture links directly to a web site. This is ideal for helping students who cannot read to find websites.

The ICT Club activities
on the Parkfield School website is a collection of picture links to fun games and activities






Activities for free time -

my own collection on a website called Sqworl .You could make you own using either Sqworl or Tizmo (see an example below)







A visual start page at Tizmo

with games suitable for switch users from
Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs

Life Skills from the BBC

Thanks to the SLD forum I have come across a great collection of video clips made for students with a learning disability.

They can be found on the BBC Learning Zone

The clips cover issues such as personal hygiene, personal safety, relationships and learning about personal belongings.