View From The Classroom
behaviour, as students are always keen to earn them and show them off to their friends and parents. I tend to customise the reward stickers with names and personalised messages, which as I’m sure any teacher can imagine, goes down a treat with students! I’m also a strong advocate of visual aids, as they tend to compliment a wide range of learning styles and work well with nearly all subjects.
There’s often a lot of discussion about using visual aids, but not all students are visual learners… It’s certainly true that all children learn in different ways, and while it may not be appropriate for all students to use visual aids, I do find that this is a method which works well for the vast majority. Over the course of my career, I’ve found that visual aids work particularly well with students with special educational needs (SEN) and so to ensure that the needs of all learners are being met, I definitely think it’s necessary to incorporate this into lessons in some capacity. Visual resources can help students to grasp
more complex concepts and above all make learning fun, which is so important when battling with the attention span of young children! Flashcards are a personal favourite of mine, as they can be used for so many different activities. For example, when teaching English you could divide your class into groups, giving each a large sheet of paper with a number of incomplete sentences on it, as well as sticky labels which have the missing words written on them. The first team to correctly match all the sentences to the missing words wins. This is a great way to teach vocabulary, syntax and tense to students with a wide range of learning styles, as well as to encourage teamwork and problem-solving.
You also mentioned child-led initiatives, please can you tell us a bit more about this? Letting students take the lead in some aspects of their education is an excellent way to promote independence and to encourage creative thinking. Awareness days are brilliant for this and there’s so much that can be done around them.
Asking students to organise a campaign for an awareness day is something which can be used across curriculum subjects. Art lessons can be used to design posters, both to create awareness of the day or cause, and also to advertise any associated fundraising events. We use Avery’s Changeable Sign Slots to display these around the school, as they can easily be changed and updated as and when needed. Students can also use English lessons to create information leaflets
and maths to learn how to calculate the costs and profits made from any fundraising activity. This enables students to see how what they learn in lessons can be applied practically and I think that bringing subjects to life in this way can really help motivate them.
Are there any resources that you couldn’t manage without, and why? Yes, Labels! Labels work in so many ways. I design my own for use all around my classroom, to help students navigate and find resources. I’d always been sceptical of products which claim to be customisable, finding that they often promise the world and don’t deliver or they just take an inconvenient amount of time to create. However, at the Education Show last year I discovered Avery’s Design & Print Software; this allows you to just go straight to the Avery website and choose from a range of colourful designs. I’ve also found that I can just as easily create or upload my own, so there are plenty of options. It’s also great for creating labels that are written in the correct font and style for dyslexic children. Using images on a label, as well as words, means that any child who has difficulty reading a particular word can instead use the picture to identify where to find the correct resource. I’ve actually found labels to be particularly useful for one child in my class who gets distressed when using a rubber to erase mistakes, as he can still see what he’s rubbed out. Now he just sticks a label over any mistakes, which allows him to continue his work without worrying. It’s this versatility which makes labels my essential classroom resource!
For further information please visit:
www.avery.eu/school
May 2015
www.education-today.co.uk 19
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