Archive for October, 2007

Artisancam and Stitch It Up!

31 October 2007

If your looking for some fun activities and inspiring ways to develop the use of ICT in Art, you can’t miss Artisancam. Developed by one of our sister Regional Broadband consortia, CLEO ( Cumbria and Lancashire online) it is a comprehensive online arts resource. All of the activities support the national curriculum in specific areas at Key Stage 2 and 3 and are linked from the SWGfL learning Grid section of the website

Artisancam

It provides an insight into the lives of contemporary artists. Using a mixture of video and interactive activities, it introduces children to the world of contemporary visual art before encouraging them to have a go themselves in fun and exciting ways. The website is divided into the Artists Zone, which contains classroom-based activities and the Activity Zone, which is full of games and fun interactive activities, designed to encourage children to continue their learning at home. For example, children can fire their own ‘virtual’ ceramic pot, or design their own piece of jewellery online.

In addition, CLEO are launching a national competition, Stitch IT Up, inviting pupils to design their own duvet online (there’s even a virtual sewing machine!). The competition opened on 15th October and will close on 14th December (nice Christmas project?). There will be regional and then national winners.

For more information, and to enter, please visit the Stich it up site: 

Stitch it up

Modelling Activities for Key Stage 2

28 October 2007

Having recently highlighted the excellent (and now finished!) ‘Big Day Out’ modelling activities for Key Stage 1, it reminded me about a couple of great free modelling activities for Key Stage 2.

The Funderstanding Roller Coaster challenges you to design a thrilling coaster ride without flying off the track. There are lots of detailed instuctions about how you can change the sizes of the hills or loop or, if you’re like me, you can just play around with the different options and see what happens! Why not post your fastest times as a comment on this link?

The second cool challenge is the Lemonade Stand from Moneyville. Here’s your chance to impress as an entrepreneur by selling as much lemonade as you can for the biggest possible profit. You need to keep an eye on the weather and be warned don’t try to charge too much.

lemonade

 

Typing Skills

13 October 2007

Whilst reading the blog by Bristol teacher Simon Mills I came across a reminder from Doug Dickinson about these two free resources for helping pupils to improve their keyboard and typing skills.  

The first involves a free download called ‘Sebran’ which contains a number of games including one called ‘letter rain’ which helps children quickly locate letters on the keyboard:

 www.wartoft.nu/software/sebran/

The second is ‘Dance Mat Typing’ from the BBC which is an introduction to touch typing: www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/

keyboard.jpg

Image supplied by http://gallery.e2bn.org/

For a more detailed description of typing software  see Spencer’s post on the B&NES Blog