Caffeine. Teach. Read. Repeat.

For the latter part of last week, I was preoccupied with attending a wonderful Reading for Pleasure conference, organised by the fantastic Marilyn Brocklehurst , (separate post to come), organising a Take Over day for Children in Need, planning our enterprise project for the Christmas fair (a Dragon's Den style challenge for Years 5 & 6) and thinking about the thousand things that need considering for next week's residential trip. This is in addition to the usual amount of stuff that comes with being a parent and a teacher. The one thing that refuses to settle in my mind though, is that I missed reading with my reading buddy last week (conference) and will again next week (residential). We normally do it the next day, on the rare occasions it doesn't happen at the usual time - Wednesdays at 1.30pm - but last week it was impossible: he was on a school trip on the Thursday and it was Children in Need on Friday. Next week, I'm away all week. This has affected me much m...

A few years ago, during some of my blogging training, David Mitchell ( @DeputyMitchell ) introduced me to a fantastic tool called  CoveritLive . It allows you to create live blogging sessions and is a great way for children to practise their descriptive writing, their editing and their critiquing skills. This is how it works. After setting up a free account, you create your event and are given an embed code to paste into your blog. When ready, you press launch event on the CoveritLive event and children are then able to write on the blog. It's like an instant messaging blog post but with everything being moderated by you on the CoveritLive event page. The event page is where I type messages to the children, add images, etc. Today, as a practise, we used it just within the class. I dragged an image onto the live chat (I had already saved it as an image in the media file) and invited half the class to write a descriptive sentence about it. I had chosen an image of ...