Shoebox Café BLOG - Private Tutor & Childminder PERTH & KINROSS, SCOTLAND

R2M What's R2M? Is your class doing it? Thousands of students, whether young, teenage or adult love star wars! As such, its characters are a great way to inject some captivating, visual stimulus into your classroom.  So what is R2M? Inspired by the character's name R2-D2, R2M stands for  'Respond to Marking!'  This is simply time that teachers give to students on a daily basis (where possible) for students to reflect and respond to marking. This is an incredibly important step in the learning process and often missed due to timetable demands. However, I have found that simply adding this to your daily routine (approx 5-10 mins) is positive in many ways; Students take more time and care over their work by checking, correcting and evaluating. Students enjoy responding back to their teacher. Students appreciate their marking more. Student's discussions on learning outcomes are more proactive, positive and reflective. Student's understandi...

Up the mountain we go! It's that time of the year again when I'm permanently glued to the computer. As I type this post, I have unfortunately got distracted from my reports in the need of having a break! ;-) Whilst I sit here chomping on a double chocolate subway cookie, I am attempting to have a quick 5 minute break.  ..... Break over!  TIPS FOR ORGANISING YOUR REPORTS 1) Set up your student files by gender! This is very simple and stops the issue of needing to find and replace he's, she's, his, her, himself, herself...etc. 2) Inside your gender files, set up 3-4 differentiated folders (Low, middle, middle-high, high) 3) Create a bank of general comments in-line with your differentiated groups, copy & paste for every child in that group followed by a quick edit and tweek.  If you have any other fantastic ideas to support with this long process...do tell! ;-)