Welcome to My Classroom: Images from a Learning Walk

My blog is primarily about ICT and Learning, but I am a classroom teacher, and not every hour of my working day is spent using the computer. To prove it here are some photos from my classroom. Last week we had some colleagues visit us from our local secondary school for a learning walk. During their visit they were encouraged to leave messages for us in the form of post it notes about features they liked, or thought would be useful in ther own classrooms. In class as well as our blog, we keep a scrapbook, of things that happen and exciting moments in our learning. I took some photographs of some of the areas of our classroom that my visiting colleagues liked and mentioned, to include in this and share with the students. To show I am not an entirely virtual teacher I thought I would also also share them here with you.


The students were not in for the visit, but this photograph shows something else that our colleagues really liked, the plants that every group have to look after in the middle of their group tables.

This is our target board, the kites are our numeracy targets, the balloons our literacy targets. As we begin to show evidence of these in our work, the kites and balloons begin to rise towards them.

Maths mountain, at the summit is our end of unit objective, and from the base of the mountain upwards the targets we are trying to hit on the way. We have a character who climbs the mountain with us and we use them to help us review our position on the mountain during plenary and opening sessions of our numeracy hour. This structure is helping not only the students but me to plot, track and find our way through the units of work we engage with. It is also helping me to structure my planning and focus my thinking about progression through our work on a weekly basis.

This is one of several Tudor displays in class. It is about Henry VIII and his Six Wives. The concertina books were highlighted as nice features, 3 d elements that drew our visitors in. They tell the story of how king Henry liked to spend his day. The black tights centre right are left over from a previous science display, that I haven't gotten round to taking down. We set the children a challenge to devise a fair test, to see which material would be stretchiest, as Henry was getting older he was getting too large for his tights, his hosiers worried about their heads needed to decide on a material that might fit over his ample frame. Which material could they use to make tights for the king, that would stretch to fit.

This is our learning tree, the leaves have on them things that the students have found interesting or exciting things they have learned, we use them for review, as well as for recording things we would like to celebrate about others as learners or good community members. Around the trunk are our Tudor Me's, framed self portraits, dressed in the tudor style. We have also published these to our communtiy pages on the school website. The thing I was really excited about was how much our visitors wanted tt celebrate the use of ICT by my students, they enjoyed the digital displays available from the school website, and the student voice we were able to bring into the classroom, even though they were visiting afterschool through use of the year group podcast site and Interactive Whiteboard.