Sal McKeown | Free Early Learning Resources for Teachers

I used to teach multiplication tables by getting people to sing them out loud. The five times table fitted very nicely to Greensleeves I seem to remember so I was intrigued to see that Sing Up has some maths themed songs. Sing Up is a not-for-profit organisation which helps teachers weave music into all areas of the primary curriculum.

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Michael Jones is a well known writer and journalist. He led the Every Child a Talker initiatives in Luton, Thurrock  and Bedford. For many years he was a colleague on Special Children magazine and I have enjoyed many of his articles about speaking and listening.

 

Lawrence Educational have now published two of his books. Let's Get Talking was written with Jo Belsten who led the Every Child a Talker in Bracknell Forest and Supporting Quiet Children which he wrote with Maggie Johnson

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The Big Schools' BirdWatch is taking place from 21 January - 1 February.  Is your school taking part? I recently saw a news item about a group of schools in East Sussex that had been engaged in a birdlife survey. These schools found that the starling was the most common visitor to playgrounds with blue tits coming in second place and woodpigeons third. This started me thinking.  How did these children know? Most of the children I know are city dwellers who can just about recognize a pigeon and a magpie. They know lots about mini beasts but birds are almost a foreign species.

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I warmed to ReportBox straightaway because it was created in my home town by a real teacher in a real school. Rachel Johnston was working in a primary school in Coventry and was struggling to produce school reports on the system the school provided. 

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The National Blind Children's Society is 16 years old. It provides support to families and schools and can help to make books, computers and recreational activities more accessible to young people.At the  Academies Show in Birminghamin November they were showing their CustomEyes Book Service. 

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When I was looking at resources and ways of working for my book How to help your Dyslexic and Dyspraxic Child I started to look very closely at the whole area of sensory play. Obviously it is crucial for children who have dyspraxia and need to gain a sense of their environment and develop fine motor skills in hundreds of different ways.  But I also discovered a world of research out there.

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Teach Your Monster to Read: First Steps is a free online game from the Usborne Foundation to help children practise and consolidate the essential first stages of reading.

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There is so much emphasis on phonics these days that reading for pleasure seems to be on the back burner so I was heartened to meet Paul Humphrey at the Education Show. He is a former Editorial Director at Wayland Publishers and has set up Fiction Express (http://schools.fictionexpress.co.uk/).  The site provides online books in parts. A chapter is published on a Friday and then readers are given options for the next instalment. They have until 3 pm on Tuesday to vote online and then the author has just two and half days to produce the next chapter.

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Storyphones are so robust and versatile that you cannot imagine how schools have managed without them. Their creator Eleanor Johnson was an early years teacher atSouthStanleyInfantsSchool inCountyDurham and didn't like the fact that children were stuck in the reading  corner with a plug-in audio head set.

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