Those of you who follow my blog regularly may have noticed that I love my classroom and I’m very into #poundlandpedagogy– see here and here. Over Easter, I wanted to transform elements of my classroom and it has been happening gradually- much more will hopefully occur in the summer.

With inspiration taken from @ASTsupportAAli I created a top websites wall for my GCSE learners. All posters were made with Poster Oven and contain QR codes. I’m carrying out a bit of an experiment to see how many students actually use them! The other half of the wall will contain top tips as we start to prepare for exams.

I then put all the equality and diversity displays over one side of the room and also posted my ‘What are you reading?’ wall. Each of the books on the posters is on my shelf so they have connections to what we’re studying and can be borrowed. I anticipate this will be expanded and will have a bigger impact from September.

I had bought some paper chain pieces #poundlandpedagogy and made a chain for the window. I then cut out some numbers from coloured A4 foam and hung them on the paper chain. I then laminated all the parts of the essays students will need to write for AS and all the terminology they might need. In the next couple of weeks, students will have to match the terms to the parts of the essays and put the parts of the essays in order- from paragraph 1 to paragraph 6. This will mean that there is a constant reminder of essay structure in the classroom. This window will develop to include key words and phrases that can be used to connect paragraphs. My luminous classroom can DEFINITELY be spotted from outside now!

I have always felt swamped with chasing students to catch up on missed work. I realised this was mainly because lessons are usually so activity and collaborative working based that I would always struggle to say exactly what they’d missed.

Now, at the end of a lesson, I will put some catch-up instructions into the missed work folder. I will name each of the sheets so that I’ll know who still needs to pick them up. The catch-up instruction sheet doesn’t take too much longer when I’m planning and I’m hoping it will help me and my students greatly.

The missed work folder is next to the share box. I got this idea somewhere and I can’t remember where! If it was you, please let me know! The idea is that whilst students are revising, they will drop in the box any posters/ notes/ flashcards they’ve made that they think others will benefit from. I will then photocopy the resource and leave the copies for students to peruse. I might kick things off with this 100 words idea from @kennypieper

Yes- the foam came out again!

I now have an ipad and went a teensy bit crazy on Phoster. I love it! I have been looking into questioning- post to follow soon. I took inspiration from some Socratic questioning things I had read recently and made these posters to encourage students to ask better questions. We shall see how things go and I have layered other things into this process- watch this space!

I also made these posters to remind students of revision sessions and exam dates. The rest of the walls are now all ready for students’ work this term! BRING IT ON!