Playing card factors

I recently had a Year 5/6 class and played a fun, easily differentiated and quick set up activity.

Children pair up and get a deck of playing cards, each child picks one off the top and places down and place down, the first to work out the factor of these two keeps the cards. Person with the most cards wins. Jacks represent 11, Queens 12, King 13 and Ace 14- I put in the jokers as a zero card because people sometimes forget any number multiplied by zero is zero.

Kids who were whizzing through made it a bit harder by working in threes and finding the product of three factors. Simples. 

Wax resist spelling

It's nice to combine art with drier areas of the school day.

I like to do wax resist with white wax crayons and watercolour paint to do spelling words. It really facilitates the children's visualising a word before they write as well as their handwriting.

They need to grab a white piece of paper, write their word with white candles and then paint over with watercolour to reveal their words. It's quite a cool little magic trick younger years just love! 

Spelling battleships

This is a nice game to play in pairs. It's just like battleships except you use spelling words.

Each player chooses five different words to put on a word list. They keep the words secret from each other. 

Players then put their five words into their own grid. They can be any direction but backwards and can't overlap. The children then take turns calling out coordinates, such as A3 for example. If they call out a coordinate that has a letter in the box then the opponent must reveal that letter and say "hit". The child then writes down this letter in the coordinate of the partners word grid. If the coordinate called out is empty then the partner must say "miss" and the child colours in the box.

Players take it in turn calling out coordinates until they can take a guess at what the partners words are. If guessed correctly the word is "sunk". Once all words are sunk then you have a winner!

The morning show!

A nice little introduction to the day is to do a morning show. I just put one together on the interactive whiteboard each time I take a new class and chose a volunteer to help me do each slide.. It's also a good way to learn their names early. If I have time up my sleeve, I let them do a self register as they come in to. To show you how it all rolls out, I've put some example pictures that are similar to the slides I make up. For older kids it might be nice to have a puzzle or riddle for them to ponder on throughout the day as a fast finisher exercise too. 

Pipe cleaner angles

Pipe cleaners are very cheap and very fun.

I recently taught a lesson about angles and used pipe cleaners to teach angles. 

I displayed a poster of angles, explained the terminology of angles: the amount of turn between two lines that share an end point of vertex, then demonstrated measuring that amount of turn with a protractor.

We then went through the types of angles, measured and labelled them. 

We then made the angles with pipe cleaners and brainstormed where they are in the environment.  

Play dough!

All kids love play dough from preschool to year 6, adults love play dough, I myself LOVE play dough! 

It's a great thing to take into school on a casual day because it's easy to make, fits into many subject areas and makes learning fun. 

A few ideas for using it in the classroom are:

-3D shapes

-spelling words

-model making

-weighing activities 

-using it as counters

-making fractions

A basic, gorgeous recipe I use is:

- 1 cup plain flour 

-1/2 cup salt

-2 tsp cream of tartar (it's near the bicarb soda in the baking aisle) 

- 1 tsp oil

- 1cup water

-food colouring

- any scents or glitter you may like to add

Just stir up the dry ingredients, mix the water and colour and stir in, bung it in a pot on low/medium heat while stirring constantly for 3-5 mins, dough will start to pull away from the sides of the pot and form a ball, take it out and knead it like mad- put your back into it and get rid of those stringy gluten strands. 

Make sure you double check it's cool to bring it into class too but chances are your efforts to bring in something lovely will be appreciated especially if you've a great lesson plan to go with it.