Yesterday I attended TeachMeet Bedford at the University of Bedfordshire. As with all TeachMeets there were some wonderful talks and I came away with more ideas to work into my teaching, some of which I’ll share on the blog soon.
I gave a short presentation on my use of fingerpuppets and Liquorice allsorts for classification and keys. If you want to read more about that, I have blogged about it here: Keys and Classification with Finger Puppets
Hand these out so that every child has a different puppet. Give them a few minutes to get the “playing” out of their system 🙂 Then ask them to get into pairs. In their pair they have to think of one question that they could ask that would differentiate their puppet from their partners. Does it have wings? Does it swim? etc. Get them to write it down.
Once done, ask them to join up with another pair. Then they need to do the same thing – think of questions they could use to differentiate the four animals. Then maybe get into an 8, or just use a table group and repeat.
Basically, we’re getting across the idea of making keys. Which is something children (and pgce students!) often struggle with.
In their groups they can then draw out a key to identify the animals on their table. Give them a large sheet of paper to do this on. Take photographs of their finished keys.
The questions need to be Yes/No questions. So you can’t have “How many legs does it have?” Questions should be “Does it have 4 legs?” or similar.
Here’s my Presentation on Prezi
In addition, I also mentioned JellyCam, which is great for stop motion animation. And Hamstersoft who make a free video converter which you could use to convert the JellyCam video into a format that Windows Movie Maker can edit.
Visit the TM Bedford Wiki for other links to presentatons from the speakers.
