This isn’t a blog post about my first few days at my new school, I;m going to wait until Friday to review the week, this is just a short one about the little ‘uns.

When I was training teachers on how to use the VLE, I used to constantly hear them say ‘But I work with Year 2, they can’t do it’ or ‘my children are only in Year R, they can’t log on’. No matter what you said, there was resistance from some people.

Today it was my turn. I had Year 1-2 children. Using our new netbooks. Logging on with their own username. For the first time ever.

OK, so how to start? I magpied an idea from the excellent Emma Goto, who is an ICT Advanced Skills Teacher here in Hampshire and is an expert in working with KS1 and Foundation. For each child, I gave them a copy of a keyboard, below, and they coloured in the letters that they were going to need to find. With younger children there can be  the problem of them not recognising capitals and lower-case letters. So I gave them their name in lower-case and their logon name in capitals. Colouring in the letters definitely helped. We also coloured in the fullstop and enter keys. These cards are now laminated too.

Within 10 minutes, the whole class of 31 had  on with only 4 needing help for missing letters. Next time, we’ll be even quicker!