Teach Middle East Magazine Mar-Apr 2018 Issue 4 Volume 5 | Page 15

children to find related to a fairy tale or popular story book. Encourage questioning, work in small groups to find the items, piece together the clues and identify the story. Set up several boxes leading to different story books and rotate around the class. Always follow your usual risk assessment procedures prior to undertaking any of these activities with children. Gratnells believes the learning environment has a profound impact on the learning outcomes for children – these What’s in my tray? activities are just one of the ways of delivering a fun way to learn in safe and familiar surroundings. are full, each group or individual can discuss what they’ve found with the group and other children can input any other ideas they have. This task will allow children to practice letter recognition and phonics, as well as expanding their vocabulary. Sorting activities are very good for allowing children to explore the environment around them and builds their confidence in identifying and organising items into groups based on different characteristics. This task in particular lends itself to teamwork and encourages the children to communicate, not only among their assigned group, but also when they come back together as a whole class to discuss their findings. Visit the Gratnells Learning Rooms website – www.learning-rooms. com – to see other ways children can be encouraged to use their imagination to learn in a more diverse and effective way. Bubble Wands Made from Edx Education’s Skelton Geo Set, these excellent math manipulatives can be used to form a wide range of regular and irregular 2D shapes and 3D models and provide a fantastic, practical, opportunity to learn about vertices, faces and edges while constructing new models. They are also great for developing fine motor skills whilst increasing and cementing mathematical vocabulary. Here we use them to build 3D models and use them as bubble wands. Become a Book Detective Use an extra deep tray, fill it with shredded paper or foam packing peanuts and hide items for the Class Time | | Mar - Apr 2018 | 13