The Fun Food Company runs nutritional shows to KS3 students during PHSE sessions (or just for fun learning), in the form of a 2 part show (1 hour long). The sessions explore the importance of a healthy breakfast and how to balance the eat well plate, as well as recognising which foods contain carbs, protein, vitamins and minerals etc. The second half of the show is a competition loosely based on the television programme ‘Ready Steady Cook’, where 2 celebrity chefs (teachers) and their 2 team mates (pupils) battle for 15 minutes to cook a balanced meal, red team (red chillies) verses the green team (green peas).

Each team has a fully functional stage kitchen with 2 electric woks, a steamer, chopping boards, knife sets and cooking utensils. Once the competition has ended, the teams present the finished food onto the centre presentation table, where 10 audience volunteers come and taste the food and give their opinion. The winner is then voted for by the audience (50 – 300 pupils).

The show sounds like a great way for pupils to learn about healthy eating and the importance of it, whilst having a fun and interactive hour. You can find contact details for The Fun Food Company on their site.

Get ready for the Big Schools’ Birdwatch! Schools can take part in the upcoming Big Schools’ Birdwatch from 16-30 January 2012, helping the RSPB to monitor UK bird numbers.

Run every year, the Birdwatch is a free activity for all UK schools and youth groups (brownies, scouts etc). There are different resource packs for each age group:

• Little Schools’ Birdwatch is for 3-5 year olds
• Big Schools’ Birdwatch is for 6-11 year olds
• Really Big Schools’ Birdwatch is for 12-14 year olds.

This simple activity is for all ages and abilities; it only takes an hour to complete and is rich in curriculum links. It’s also a great way to get to know more about the wildlife visiting your school grounds. If you don’t have school grounds, don’t worry! You can still take part by visiting a local park. Teachers and group leaders can find out more at www.rspb.org.uk/schoolswatch and to register for their free resource pack. The website also has lots of other activities to accompany the Birdwatch to download, including child (and teacher) friendly bird ID pages.

Don’t forget to explore other educational events that you can can get involved in at Teaching Events.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been busy working on a new set of themed resources for my Teaching Ideas site. I’m pleased to say that the new theme is now available!

The theme has over 100 teaching ideas, activities, display resources, videos and photos… all of which can be used to support teaching about healthy eating, the human body and exercise. There are lots of posters which you can print and put on your classroom wall, as well as activity sheets for children to use.

Teaching Ideas now has 14 themes and I’m planning some more themes which will be published over the next few months and in 2012. If you’re starting to think about Christmas lessons, don’t forget to look at the Christmas theme!

I get to watch lots of online videos in my search for new additions to my Teaching Videos site. The site now has almost 2,500 educational videos, so I thought that I would share some of my favourites… the most inspirational… the most incredible… the most beautiful… and the most entertaining. Here they are:

1) Try to Do – This wonderful video tells a great story about a baby squirrel who tries to climb a big wall. It is a fantastic way of encouraging children to think about perseverance and determination, as well as exploring ways of helping others.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2) I’ll Be Gone - This video could be used to discuss how sounds and music are made… watch the rhythm of each sound played out in the video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3) Steve Spangler Science – Steve has a huge collection of online videos which teach Science in very exciting ways. Lots of his experiments can be tried at home or in the classroom, but some (like the one below) are definitely not appropriate!

Click here to view the embedded video.

4) Landscapes: Volume Two – This is a beautiful video which features stunning time-lapse video of landscapes in Arizona and Utah. It would be great for inspiring descriptive writing about settings and locations.

Click here to view the embedded video.

5) The Water Cycle stop motion – I love stop-motion animations and we make lots of them at school too. This video is a great animation about the water cycle which is perfect for Science lessons:

Click here to view the embedded video.

6) The Balloon Lady - Can you write a story about the Balloon Lady? Why is she so cheerful? How does it make the other people feel to be given a balloon? What happens to the balloons after the end of the film?

Click here to view the embedded video.

7) Kuroshio Sea – This looks incredible in full-screen HD on an interactive whiteboard. I’ve shown this to classes a number of times and the reaction is always ‘WOW!’.

Click here to view the embedded video.

8 ) The Highwayman – Lots of schools use ‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes as part of their Literacy lessons and this animated video is a great accompaniment for any work using the book. Don’t forget that there are more teaching ideas linked to The Highwayman on my Teaching Library site.

Click here to view the embedded video.

9) Test Your Awareness – This extremely popular video is a great test of children’s observation skills!

Click here to view the embedded video.

10) Haerskogen – These amazing little creatures could be used in the classroom in lots of ways. Can your children write a description of them, or a story about their lives? Could they design their own creatures in Art, DT or ICT? Could you use them in Science for work on habitats and adaptation?

Click here to view the embedded video.

What are your favourite online videos?

Lots of schoolchildren from across the country have already signed up for a national fundraising initiative organised by Honda (UK) and the charity Greenfingers. The pupils will take part in the ‘Get Gardening for Greenfingers’ fundraising campaign in March 2012 and the organisers are calling for more schools to join in.

Pupils are sponsored to do a variety of small gardening jobs for friends and family during the week. They could sow seeds, tidy up leaves or compost kitchen scraps. The challenge is to complete 10 small tasks for £1 each. Get Gardening for Greenfingers aims to raise a minimum of £15,000 for the first ever ‘Magical Play Garden’ funded by schoolchildren. Greenfingers will build the garden at a chosen children’s hospice in the UK. The initiative will also promote gardening in schools and raise awareness of safety in the garden.

To join in with Get Gardening for Greenfingers, please call Greenfingers on 01494 674749 or email info@greenfingerscharity.org.uk. The charity will need to know who will co-ordinate the activity in each school, the number of children taking part and in which years and whether the school would like to organise a ‘Stay Safe in Your Garden’ talk from a participating Honda Lawn and Garden Dealer.

Here are links to five great new resources that I’ve found online this week:

1) Classdojo (shared by Lara Savory) – Classdojo is a wonderful online behaviour management system. When you set up your class you can give points for positive behaviour (and remove them for negative behaviour). You can also track the children’s scores over time which could be useful for reporting to parents. It’s even possible to use a mobile device to add rewards to the system. Watch this video to find out more:

Click here to view the embedded video.

2) Pictograph Generator – The amazing John McClear has created a simple online pictograph generator. It’s easy to use and customise and is a great resource for Maths (data handling / problem solving) and ICT work. Watch this video to see how it works:

Click here to view the embedded video.

3) The Water Cycle - This great animation (shared on the great The Kids Should See This blog) shows how the water cycle works. It is very visual and could be used as part of Science work. Could your pupils write some narration for the video? I’ve added this video to Teaching Videos, so don’t forget to look there for more educational video resources.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4) Your Paintings – This is a wonderful resource from the BBC, sharing 77,000 paintings online. You can find paintings by artist or features and you can also look at items within paintings that have been tagged. There are some ideas for teachers on the site’s blog.

5) Young Science Investigators Project Kit (shared by Sophie Bessemer) – This free resource is focused on science at work in the real world and scientific enquiry skills, based around three topics: electricity, forces and materials. It has lots of hands on activities for the children to do in or out of the classroom, with some accompanying animations, teachers notes, worksheets and curriculum links.

Which of these is your favourite resource?

I add new videos to my Teaching Videos site on a regular basis, using a number of Youtube subscriptions to find useful videos (as well as videos shared on Twitter and in my RSS subscriptions). One Youtube channel that I particularly enjoy checking is for Steve Spangler Science.

Steve is a science author, teacher, professional speaker, toy designer, a television personality… and a big kid! His Youtube channel shares lots of big Science activities and events that he has been involved in. However, there are also a number of ‘Sick Science’ videos which feature tricks and experiments that can be played in the classroom. They’re great for provoking discussion about how the ‘trick’ works and talking about the Science concepts involved.

You could also try to recreate the experiment yourself as lots of them involve everyday classroom objects. Here’s an example:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you have any favourite educational Youtube channels, please get in touch as I would love to hear about them!

I’ve come across lots of fantastic new resources over the past few weeks, so here are some of my favourites:

1) QR Code Treasure Hunt Generator (shared by Christine Cox) – This wonderful tool lets you make your own treasure hunts… children have to answer questions (which you provide) but the questions are in the form of QR codes which they have to scan with handheld devices (e.g. an iPod Touch). You can hide the QR codes around school and get them to find the answers as they search around school. A great use of mobile technology.

2) Report Comment Bank (shared by Kristian Still) – Although many schools have now finished writing reports for a while, here’s is a site which can be saved for future use. It is a bank of report comments which cover a huge range of subject and topic areas. Registration is required but the site is free to use.

3) Duck Duck Go (shared by Darcy Moore) – Duck Duck Go is a clear and simple search engine which is less cluttered than many other popular search tools. The site gives dictionary definitions as well as search results and there are ‘Safe Search’ options too. Has anyone used this in the classroom yet?

4) If It Were My Home (shared by Lucy Gray) – If you were not born in the country you were, what would your life be like? Would you be the same person? This site lets you compare living conditions for people in countries around the world. It’s a fascinating way to find out about life in other places.

5) Wild Earth (shared by Lucy Gray) - This site has lots of live webcams showing animals in their natural habitats around the world. You can even watch a live safari from the Sabi Sands Game Reserve. There are also profile pages for many of the animals that you might see on the cameras to help you to learn more about them.

What is your favourite recent discovery?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been creating lots of new resources to share on Teaching Ideas. Some of these include:

Writing Inspirations – These images and questions can be used to provide ideas and inspiration for writing in your classroom. They could be used as a lesson starter to develop the children’s imaginations, or as part of writing activities in the main part of your lessons.

Science Inspirations – These resources are similar to the writing inspiration series, but for Science! They could be used to trigger discussions about the particular scientific topics, to review existing knowledge or to introduce new topics to the pupils.

I would love to hear your feedback about these ‘Inspirations’ resources, as I’m am very happy to make some more… to add to the current Writing and Science collections and / or for new subject areas.

Numbers to 20 in French, German and Spanish - If you would like bigger numbers, or similar sets in different languages, please let me know!

As Teaching Ideas continues to grow, I’m also adding new sets of contents pages to organise the resources more clearly. Don’t forget that you can follow the Teaching Ideas RSS feed or join my mailing list to get the latest updates to the site. Thank you!

StudyJams is an animated site which has over 200 Maths and Science ‘Jams’ to use in your classroom. The Jams include karaoke songs which you can sing along to and cartoons which teach different concepts. They are all explained clearly with images and animations to help pupils to remember the topics. There are also related tests and key vocabulary which link with each Jam.

Some of the spellings are American, but this is still a really valuable resource for teachers in other countries too. Visit the site at studyjams.scholastic.com.