iPad App Ideas

At school I have taken on the role of iPad coordinator. As part of this I created a document to share with the other teachers at school to show them different ways to use a variety of apps in the classroom.


We have started to receive some iPad training at school that is introducing me to new apps for use in the classroom.  This guide is more of a working document that I will continue to add to as I learn about new apps and other ways to use the ones we already have.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

In P2/3 the students have been learning about Scotland as next week is Burns Night.

I decided to do some Scottish art with them and chose to look at Charles Rennie Mackintosh as his art is so iconic and reasonably easy to produce.

First we talked about who Charles Rennie Mackintosh was and then looking at some examples of his work, which the children were impressed with. We watched a video from YouTube by Nichole Hahn, who sounds like she comes from somewhere over the Atlantic.



The video was really good as it went through the process very clearly and step by step.

We then had some practice at drawing our flowers and using a ruler to draw straight lines before the students were to come up with two different design options. This was an important step as some of the pupils in the class struggled to draw the roses initially but the practice opportunity enabled them to be successful and they ended up creating some fantastic pieces.

Once the class had chosen their final designs they enlarged them onto a nice plain piece of paper and coloured them in. We looked at some more examples of Mackintosh's art and chose our colour palette from them.

Help! My fibula hurts!

We have continued our exploration of the organs and bones in the human body.

First we recapped what we had learnt about lungs and ribs last week - the children needed a bit of encouragement to talk about breathing being important for bringing in oxygen but showed a good understanding of this concept by the end of the lesson.

We then did an activity to see who had the biggest lung capacity in the class. It was important to explicitly tell the students we were talking about lung capacity not just who had the biggest lungs. The idea for the lesson came from some online searching. I found the website blogshewrote and the post about measuring lung capacity. I felt that this was a good activity as we had covered measuring last term and it required relatively little resources.

The students were instructed to use one breath and to fill their balloon as much as they could with that breath. We made our predictions before we started and I said I thought the child who talked the most would have the biggest. After the initial excitement of being given a balloon the class soon settled down to see who had the biggest lung capacity.

They really enjoyed this activity and it was good to see them getting a bit more practice at measuring too. The results ranged from 15cm through to 53cm and it was great to end up with a 'winner' at the end.

Science 1-12a and 1-13a

We started back after the holidays with a bang! In primary 3/4 we are learning about our organs and skeleton and how to keep ourselves healthy.

First we undertook some activities to do with making a ping pong ball hover. We did it in three stages.
1. I gave the students a ping pong ball and asked them if they could make it hover. We talked about what hovering was and told them they couldn't use any other equipment. After they had experimented with this I saw 4 different techniques appearing. Lying and blowing, lying and blowing whilst cupping their mouths, standing and blowing, standing and blowing whilst cupping their mouths. We talked about the different techniques and compared which was the most effective.

2. I then gave the students a straw to use. We had decided that cupping their mouths meant that they were directing the air more towards the ping pong ball and wondered if using a straw would help them to achieve the hovering better or not.

3. Finally we tried using straws and cups together so wee if that was any easier. Before we tried using the equipment the students predicted whether they thought it would be easier or harder and gave reasons for their thoughts.

This activity was used as an introduction to talking about our bodies. Today's lesson was talking about lungs and ribs. We discussed what lungs are for, how to keep them healthy and things that are bad for them.

Then we went outside to try out some activities that would make our lungs stronger. We walked and breathed in for 4 steps then out for 8 steps. The students found this quite hard and seemed to think they were supposed to be holding their breath rather than exhaling for the whole time. Then we did some short sprints until the children became out of breath and talked about how that would make our lungs stronger.