I’ve been planning some KS1 ICT today. I’m not a KS1 expert at all, I teach 1 morning a week of KS1, but a few things have made my life a lot easier and I thought I’d share them with you to see if it might help when you plan next time. There are others out there that are much more advanced and experienced than I am, but hey. Here’s what I’ve started doing.
Firstly, the topic. The children will be looking at their local area and comparing it to Katie Morag’s Island of Coll. They will be visiting the local village and conducting a traffic survey and will hopefully then look at ways in which to calm the traffic through the village. So that’s my brief. Where can ICT fit in?
At the moment, each class has 1 ICT lesson a week and this can be in the suite or with netbooks in the class. I want to try and integrate ICT across the whole curriculum to give children a varied ICT experience.
I am also the PPA teacher, I provide ICT plans for the 3 KS1 classes but I only teach ICT in one of them. We have discussed it and I think the best thing to do is to provide the teachers with a variety of objectives and activities, they can then pick and choose which they do.
So the objectives include:
- To use text and images to develop their ideas
- To share and present information in a variety of forms
- To present their completed work effectively
I then sat with the plan from two-years ago (it’s a 2yr cycle) and looked at each subject area to see the general gist of where the topic was going. I then loaded some of my favourite tools and here we go…
The children will be conducting a traffic survey so they will need to know about data handling and the furbles would be a great place to start.From there, we can then move on to 2Count and 2Graph so that we can begin making our own graphs. These are both part of Purple Mash.Hopefully the children will realise that the traffic goes through the village too quickly so they will discuss how to slow it down, using activities like Zigzag or Traffic Issues on Mash to help them.There are some more great data handling tools on the free iboard site too.
As we are looking at cars in the village, why not use 2Design and Make to make our own one? We could then graph those too?
When it comes to researching our local town and a Scottish island, then I turn to Simon’s excellent Infant Encyclopedia to help the children with their research. This has a range of short activities, videos and games for the children.
They will also need to look at their village and a Scottish one so why not use Google Maps and Streetview? That will make a great comparison tool. It would be even better if we could link to a school on an island too and I have already put those plans in place as well.There is a bear that travels a lot too, so we will have a quick look at Barnaby and his travels from the BBC.
So with that range of activities, the children will be learning to find information and to research using the internet, to present and analyse graphs and also to combine text and graphics using a simple tool such as Purple Mash. They of course will be reinforcing the skills of loading websites, logging on and using the netbooks safely and saving work too.
How do I present this to our children? These links will all be put on our school website (like I talked about here) so that the children can click and load the site or at most, login to Mash and then complete the activity.
I’m not sure if this is the best way of planning, but it seems to work and means there is variety. Will all three classes do the same activities? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter. I want them to be able to transfer skills from one tool to the other and this should give them the chance to do that. With the exception of the paid-for elements of Mash, this is all free too. I just wonder if it would work with KS2 or do they need longer project-type ICT sessions?
With thanks to Simon Haughton for these data handling ideas.
