WELCOME FIFTH GRADERS!

Hello, and welcome back to school. I am so excited to have you in my English classroom. It is going to be a fun and excited year. 

I think you are really going to enjoy this year. We will be learning many new things and you will be making many new friends. 

Let me introduce you to the first new thing of the year, welcome to "LEARNING WITH TEACHER SANDRA"💥, an educative blog that will allow us to learn as many things as possible in an interactive and enjoyable way. 

There will be an entry for each unit, where we will review everything we learned in class and we will have different activities for continuing to discover new things.

Let your parents know that this blog is also for them, it will be an opportunity for getting in contact and, besides, I will upload useful information for them.  

ARE YOU READY TO START?

I am looking forward to seeing you all in class!

See you in the next chapter👋

Attention to diverisity

 STUDENTS WITH ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER (ADHD)

Here you can find different links to activities for these children, I hope you find them interesting and useful. 

1- To foster students´ concentration and attention:

https://www.mentalup.co/subscription-general/subscription-payment  

(it is necessary to pay for its use).  

https://www.additudemag.com/focus-games-for-children-with-adhd-attention-problems/

2- Memory games: 

https://www.whatdowedoallday.com/memory-games-for-kids/ 

3- Games at home: 

https://www.gympanzees.org/our-services/online-resource-hub/adhd/20-games-to-play-to-burn-energy-at-home-for-adhd 

4- Provide rewards: 

https://www.classdojo.com/en-gb/?redirect=true  (to increase students´ motivation, to create a positive environment in the class, and to make students aware of the positive aspects of their learning process). 

I hope you find these activities useful

See you in the next chapter👋

Useful information for the families

FIVE ADVICE FOR DEALING WITH TECHNOLOGY AT HOME

At the moment, we are living in the Information and Knowledge Society, where almost every child has a computer at his or her disposal.  The technological revolution reflects the idea that children are becoming computer experts at a very young age. However, with all this constant exposure to this "world", there are some important concerns about how teachers and families can implement technology for educational purposes, without being damaging for children. In short, ITC´s are a good tool for education when they are used correctly and managed by an adult. 

In the following lines, five pieces of advice will be listed with the objective of encouraging a correct use of technologies at home: 

1. Select the appropriate links according to the age of the students. Internet is a huge world where you can find plenty of information and resources to be used, however, not everything is true and useful, that is why adults must research until finding the ideal resources that suit our students. 
2. Control the time: Too much exposure to a digital screen can provide prejudicial effects to children such as social interaction issues, obesity, falling grades, etc. 
3. Do not avoid traditional methods. A perfect educational method does not exist. That is why we can combine traditional methods with technology in order to achieve the best results possible. 
4. Cybersecurity software: They can be also useful to ensure children´s security while they are using the internet.
5.  Perceive technology as an enjoyable tool for learning: Students are going to find the learning process fun and interesting, which is going to increase their motivation and interest for the content to be learnt.

I hope you find all this information useful

See you in the next chapter👋

 

Activities for fast finishers

 FAST FINISHERS, THIS ENTRY IS FOR YOU!

Congratulations 🎉on finishing all your homework as fast! Here, you have an opportunity to continue learning.

Click on the link you like the most and start playing the different games. I am sure you will have a good time with all of them. 

1- Present simple: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/present-simple/ 

https://www.eslgamesplus.com/present-simple-tense-action-verbs-interactive-monkey-game/ 

2- Questions: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/questions/ 

3- Spelling: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/spelling-bee/ 

4- Speaking: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/speaking-phrases/

5- Prepositions: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/prepositions-game/

6- Hangman: https://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/hangman/ 

7- Adjectives: https://www.liveworksheets.com/ak1222716iy 

8- Daily routine: https://www.liveworksheets.com/hy2382377xr

9- Countries: https://www.eslgamesplus.com/countries-esl-vocabulary-memory-game-with-flags-low/

10- Story maker: https://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/games/story-maker-1 

I hope you enjoy all the activities

See you in the next chapter! 👋

 Reflect on my own super learning

It is time to say goodbye to this amazing subject. It is been five months where we have learned many different alternatives to implement ICT´s in our lessons. Technologies have started to invade the real world and that is why teachers must adapt their way of teaching according to this new reality. We have discovered how to create avatars, boards to organic materials, comics, mindmaps, infographics, slideshows, podcast and video clips, all of them under the creative commons licenses. However, this is just the beginning of our learning. ICT´s change every day, so we have to keep updated all the time and surfing to use the best tools possible. 

To summarize our learning, here you can see an infographic created with Piktochart with all the projects that we have carried out during these months. I have listed the benefits that they have for education and a couple of digital tool for creating them.

Apart from it, in the end, you can see my own personal reflection and the tools that I absolutely recommend to use in the classroom.  I want also to highlight one of the key ideas from this learning and it is the importance of social media. The correct use of platforms such as Twitter, Instagram or Tik Tok can have plenty of benefits for our students because they see them as entertainment, which can motivate and engage them into the learning process more than traditional exams and homework do. 

I hope you have enjoyed the different posts that I have created.

It is not goodbye! See you soon...👋

 Record a video clip: "Back to 1256"

The first part to create a video is to think about what you want to say. To learn how to do it have a visit to my last post "Storyboard a video project". 

After doing the script it is time to record the video. In our case, we did it using the camera of our mobile phone and a drone. If you have one at your disposal I absolutely recommend you to use it, the views look amazing👀.

When the video is ready, it is time to edit it to make it look more flashy and attractive for the audience. There are many different programs to modify your video. It is necessary to have a view of a couple to choose the ideal one for you. You should check how professional it is because there are very complete resources that can be difficult to use, and for pedagogical videos, a simple program easy to use is enough. Some of them are, Powtoon, Screencast -O-Matic, Tellagami, Touchcast, Flipgrid or iMovie (just for apple), one we chose.

iMovie lets you edit your video close to the most professional platforms. You can cut and paste and edit the duration as you wish, include effects, music, audio, images. Furthermore, it also has a wide range of templates, filters, special effects, trailers and amazing beginnings and endings to make your project more engaged to the students from the very beginning. 

Related to the music we used lamusicagratis.com. It is a website where you can download music without copyright, accessible for everybody. 

Finally, the last step is to upload the video to an online service or repository. In our case, we decided to use youtube. 

Now, it is time to present the video. It has been a group project. You can also visit the entries from my partners. 

Title: "Back to 1256"

Objectives: To compare how we live now and how people live centuries ago.

To raise awareness of cultural aspects. 

Subject: Social science. 

Grade: 5th grade. 

Here you are! I hope you enjoy it. 

See you in the next chapter👋

 Storyboard a video project 

Create a video is a very interesting task for children. With these kinds of activities, students are going to increase their creativity, imagination, language and communicative skills. Most of the time, these tasks are performing in groups, which is why they are also going to work on cooperative and collaborative skills. they are a kind of role-playing where students are going to feel and think like other people, which is also a crucial fact to develop in young learners. 

The first step to creating a video is thinking about what this video is going to be about. Children must do brainstorming to share their ideas, and then choose one that everybody agrees with. 

After that, it is time to do the script to order the characters´ different ideas, settings, and dialogues. Also, we can include explanations and the words that the narrator would say. There are different ways for preparing the script, however, we decided to use "Storyboard that" for planing our video. If you want to know more about this tool check my post "The benefits of comics in education".  

To finish, let me present our work. In the picture below you can see a storyboard that we created to organize the ideas of our video. It consists of 3x2 comic strips which is a free option in the application. The theme of our video is "The middle ages". We want to do a comparison between how we live nowadays and how people lived many centuries ago. 

 

 Do you want to watch the video? You will do it in the next post...

To be continued... 👋