September 2015 – OZTHOUGHTS

Egyptian Cats & Little Girl – Has To Be A Story Here.

I have decided to broaden my teacher’s resource offerings. Originally I intended it to be simply videos that I felt could function as a starting point for story telling in the classroom, but I quickly found that there were loads of amazing photos to be found on the net that would also function remarkably well as sort of idea kick-starters. So here is the first of these offerings that I hope you will find useful your classroom.

I have no idea what was happening here, but this image has so many elements that it has to be a good source of discussions and story telling. What on earth is that little girl doing there? Simply playing at being one of those cat statues, or is it the instant before she is shape-changed and zoomed off to a life in ancient Egypt? There are so many possibilities in this strange image – let your kids loose on it and see where their fantasy takes them.

Share with us:

Do come back and let us share what your students made of this image…. Good to know what others achieve with such materials……

Like A Girl – Generate Ideas About Gender Roles In Your Classroom.

Continuing my endeavour to build up a useful teachers resource here on my blog, I now offer you a video that could well be used to spark off discussions about the role of gender in how we look at each other.

This shortish video, called “Like a Girl”, is about how western society looks at the way in which we feel girls should behave, and sensibly enough, also shows how damn foolish these preconceptions really are.

Show this video to your class, and then ask them to discuss it, and I suspect you will find that the kids for the greater part agree with what the kids in the video say. Though, you may well be surprised too by how many seem to agree that girls should behave in a “girlie” fashion….. People are odd.

A number of issues are looked at in this video, all of which relate to the preconceptions we all have about how girls and women should behave, and happily, the girls and women in the video – and several guys as well, show clearly how daft these ideas actually are.

So, here it is, do let me know if you find this a useful teaching aid or not.

By the way, the people who made this video, have a whole series of videos that will be of real interest to the girls in your classroom, , in which various aspects of being female and growing up are looked at in a straightforward manner, well worth exploring I feel.

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Videos… Great Teacher’s Resource For Story Telling.

Whilst grazing gently on my Facebook page, it dawned on me that all those videos and images that “friends” post, showing all manner of amazing things, could be a very useful resource for teachers.

Many of these videos leave one wondering what happened next, or can easily be used as a starting point for creative writing lessons. Show the class one of these videos, and then ask them to carry the story on, either in words, or in pictures, depending on the content of the video.

To get us started:

To get the ball rolling, here is a rather beautiful video of a guy blowing huge bubbles on a beach. Nothing much happens, but the ethereal beauty of the bubbles, and the kids having a ball bursting them could well give rise to some intriguing stories I feel.

Invasion of the Space Bubble Aliens…….?

Bubbles on a Beach:

And?

So, did this give rise to any ideas? I would be intrigued to hear what stories this video may have produced.

Database of Videos for teachers:

To this end, I intend to post such videos on this blog, in order to create a sort of database of videos that can be used in a variety of different ways in the classroom, each with a set of teacher’s notes to help start the thinking needed to make best use of such videos.

Saving teacher’s time:

I realise that teachers could perfectly well hunt the net for suitable videos themselves, but as the husband of a teacher, I know how little spare time teachers actually have to carry out such searches. Think about it for a minute, you have to first of all find a video that fits your needs, which entails watching many videos to find just the right one, and also to be sure that it does not contain any unsuitable images or sounds, that it isn’t too long, but equally not too short… and so it goes.. A very time consuming exercise in fact. So I hope that as time goes by and I build up a big library of links to all manner of videos this blog will become a useful resource for teachers.

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