The Pencil Cycle

I work in a computer lab. There is generally very little use for stationary, but I keep a pencil-holder type object on my desk. At the start of the year it was mostly filled by pens and perhaps a single pencil.

The pencil holder (the sides are magnetic).

During the course of this year, I have acquired a number of orphaned pencils. The sheer number of them is surprising, since rarely do children bring stationary in here. The only occasions are when I ask for it, which is not often, and when children do their homework in the lab in the afternoon. I tend to assume that if you are doing homework you would keep an eye on what stationary is yours and take it with you when you leave. This is not the case. We find pencils on the floor, under and behind desks, on the desks - everywhere. Whenever I find a pencil that has no name and has been enjoying life in the computer lab for a while, I add it to my pencil holder. Inevitably, the pencils end up being used by me or borrowed by a child - and then they disappear again. 

This pencil cycle has worked it's way into my expectations - I don't get concerned when all of the pencils disappear, because I know that eventually my stock will be replenished. The highest record for adopted pencils was 6 living in the pencil holder, at the moment we are on 3. A new addition was found on the floor this morning. I haven't had to buy a single pencil this year so far.

We do find the occasional eraser, but that is much rarer. There is a general catch-all lost property box that houses the miscellaneous items that are left here. I'm not a monster, if a stationary item has a name then we return it. The only other item that is left behind as much as pencils is homework diaries. The homework diaries are used by my young students to record their logins and passwords for our educational websites - they leave them behind often just out of sheer forgetfulness when being fetched by parents in a rush.

Willy the Wizard Conversations

In Grade 1, my students have been reading a number of Anthony Browne's books, including the great Willy the Wizard. A teacher asked for us to find a way to use Willy the Wizard to practice writing conversations. I took a picture of the worksheet that she had found and then inserted it into MS Word. I set the text to be on top of the image and set two columns to cover both speech bubbles. This way my young Grade 1s could work on their Word familiarity as well as get in some literacy practice.

Here are some snapshots of the finished products. It's not often we get to see IT work printed out and so proudly on display in the classroom - it's a delight to see.

ESET Security Day 2015

Yesterday, some colleagues and I attended the first every ESET Security Day in Cape Town.

I give them points for almost getting the surname correct.

It was my first ever work conference and a great opportunity to start to develop the tech side of my job with a bang. The most interesting speaker, for me, was Daan Potgieter's explanation of  the 1 to 1 tablet program his school have rolled out. There was all sorts of discussion about the pitfalls concerning such an initiative. It was great to experience that because my school is beginning an iPad rollout next year. It will start from Grade 4 upwards, not directly effecting us down in Junior Primary, but we are going to be expected to 'upskill' our students in order to start with the iPads when they get to Senior Primary. In a nutshell, Hoërskool Waterkloof chose Android tablets because they were more reasonably priced and they could have third-party security solutions (like ESET, who sponsored the event). I was most impressed to hear that their school manages more than double the devices that we do with the same amount of tech support staff! Kudos to those hard-working techs.

One point that he highlighted was the importance of standardisation of the devices. Mr Potgieter gave the explanation of even the size of tablet could hugely impact on your teaching - students with different sized screens would display a reader or textbook differently, so they would all have different page numbers. Assigning reading would therefore have to be carefully done, such as selecting a chapter or topic rather than the common method of page numbers.

Another point which has been niggling me: iOS doesn't allow third-party security/control applications. This doesn't surprise me, from my limited experience with an iPad this suits the impression I had so far. Apple has it's own products which cover things like antivirus, remote management, multi-device management and so on. The problem is that not all of these vital features have rolled out here in South Africa yet. This makes even managing a mobile iPad lab a chore because there is no other option available but to do updates and adjustments manually, on each individual iPad. I will be chatting to our Apple Distinguished Educator at school, he is very passionate about our iPad rollout and is well aware of the blocks that are in place - hopefully these are temporary blocks.

On a side note, the food at the conference was excellent and the venue was great. All of the organisers were friendly and the atmosphere was a positive one. I'm looking forward to my next conference!

Winter

It's the winter break for me, which is always strange when a large part of my life is online. The Northern Hemisphere is sweltering, at least, according to their Facebook posts. I've just discovered the joy of an electric hot water bottle and am living in my dressing gown and woolly socks.

My Hero Kids club ran well this term. All four students were thrilled with the conclusion with the story and the certificates I had made them. They blazed through the set module I had planned to use, so the last 3 sessions were on-the-fly adventures of going to investigate and retrieve a missing wagon from the forest. At the end of the session, Mayor Smith asked them to be the official Town Guard.

"It feels like we didn't do a lot but if you look at this list we did quite a lot!"

I asked them about advice for running the group again next term. One girl pitched the idea of an alchemist type class that "uses potions". The others asked that their characters be included as NPCs in the next game, "we want to be in the other story". All of them tried to wrangle their way back into the club again, which I consider a mark of success.

Our Knight pondering the battlefield.

The counting cubes were very helpful as they fit my maps - which I hadn't printed exactly to scale.

My happy heroes in the Learning Commons, our gaming spot.

Our IT Lab received two new massive beanbags this term. We are still deciding when they should be used, but a wonderful opportunity happened recently. In South Africa, we frequently have power outages called 'load shedding'. This means that the IT Lab is basically useless. On this particular afternoon, though, a mood descended among the scattered group of aftercare children. Usually content to plug themselves into a computer while they waited for pick-up, they found that this avenue of distraction wasn't possible. When I came to check on them, a colleague of mine had flomped herself onto a beanbag and started asking for their help with ideas for an art project. A child was scribbling ideas onto the board in mindmap format. Another girl was sitting with the teacher, looking at designs. Even the boys, inspired by the creative mood, leaped at my idea of drawing and sprawled across the entrance (where you could see the best with the daylight coming in) and drew up their own creations. Load shedding is usually a huge headache, none of our tech has UPS or other battery power, but on this day the kids didn't care.

A hive of activity, even with load shedding.

This term, the Grade 1s have suddenly become able to read and write! I love this spurt of literacy because I find that I can do so much more with them in the IT lab. They particularly love using MS Word to type out 'stories'. We try to use the sounds they've been learning, like the qu sound, that produced this masterpiece:

I took a shot of this fine diatribe outside the proud teacher's classroom.

We've also been encouraging them to attempt their own spelling attempts before coming to us for help. The Gr 1 teachers have cleverly started asking children to bring their individual whiteboards and markers for spelling. This one is great, the student's attempt is first with my messy handwriting underneath:

Never has a language got so close to being called a unicorn.

Lastly, it's rare for me to get the cute notes that other JP teachers might get, since I am not a classroom teacher with my own little brood of students. I was lucky enough to have this very kind note given to me on the last day of term. Like anything in life, it's being appreciated that makes teaching worth it.

Hero Kids: First Session

White cubes (rats) face off against our party.

Today, my Hero Kids players met during Club time and managed to do the following:

• Started the adventure in a tavern
• Accepted a call for help
• Went into a basement and defeated a group of rats

Three cliches in one session, it's awesome. Nothing is a cliche to these kids because it's all new to them. They managed to defeat the four rats in the first encounter. I left the special rules aside and focused on basic melee attack and defence, as well as health levels. We've had a new player join us, Kai the Knight:

Kai is the tank with a mighty 3 defense.

Today we did a recap of the whole concept, looked at our character sheets and began the adventure. I recorded the 45 minute session's audio for posterity and to save me having to keep notes. Once I get over the cringing at listening to my recorded voice, it will be super useful and perhaps hilarious - my kids are funny.

GM (me): Are you going to run back to your house and get your weapons?

Sophie the Warrior: I've got my axe.

GM: You've got your axe with you already? Do you have it with you here in the restaurant?

Sophie: [beat] I just take my axe everywhere.

They took to the general idea of an RP session fine, and enjoyed rolling dice - they found it very suspenseful waiting to see which side would win a dice roll. I began to encourage them to use 'words like in a story', actual descriptions, of what they wanted to do. They got a kick out of using character names instead of their real names, which I wanted to do to make the recording easier to parse but also helped them remember their roles. 

The Knight player had lots of creative suggestions but is still adjusting to the idea of giving ideas that can work with what they're trying to achieve. I am trying not to be the downer who is denying all of the oddball ideas, but I suppose someone needs to draw the line. He wanted to be able to throw his shield, but in this system there's a clear line between melee and ranged. So, we settled for the concept of him using his shield to bash melee enemies. 

Large iPad stuck in the middle of the group. 

The iPad audio seemed very effective, though I need a better space for it to live as it took up some room. I chose the floor to sprawl ourselves out on, next time I'll take the time to lay out some desks or find a play-space that has desks set up permanently, maybe in the Learning Commons.

So far, so good! We had quite a few eager watchers during the last part of the game as students came in from break-time. I'm almost disappointed I'm on leave for the next few weeks so that we can't carry on with Hero Kids right away.

Hero Kids: Intro Session

Sophie the Warrior and Character Sheet

Yesterday, I pitched the concept of roleplaying games to a group of Grade 2s and 3s. I had worried about dealing with a large group but, delightfully, I ended up with 3 enthusiastic youngsters. We met after the Clubs assembly, so didn't have a lot of time to get in depth.

I showed them the Map of Brecken Vale and read out the opening crawl from the rule book, which explains that they are all from the same town. Their parents are all adventurers and are often busy outside the valley that they live in, which leaves the PCs (player characters) to handle any domestic problems. Then, I brought out the awesome colouring-in pages and talked them through the basic character classes.

Some great comments and questions from the kids:

"If you're a girl do you have to choose a girl?" - great question, will discuss more about character versus self
"Can you choose more than one [character]?" - our boy wanted to play them all
"Look, he has bowls on his shoulders!" -referring to the Knight's makeshift armour

Our headstrong girl choose the girl warrior the moment she clapped eyes on her. The boy in our party loved all of the male characters and wanted to play a few of them, but eventually choose the archer. Our second girl deliberated between the healer and the thief, but in the end decided that she was sneaky and picked the thief.

Once they'd chosen a character, I brought out the character sheets for the three classes. The two girls could easily read everything on the character sheet. There was a lot of information to discuss, so I didn't get to it all this session. To start with, I focused on something central for them- how they would hit things. They found it interesting that the Warrior could only attack close up, the Archer could only attack from distance, and the Thief could do both - but not as well as the Warrior or Archer. We noticed that the Warrior also has the most health, so it would be good for her to be in the front during battles. In Hero Kids, each character has a specialisation. The warrior, appropriately, is very persuasive. The thief is sneaky and can use disguises. The archer can track animals and people.

When the bell rang, I gave them their character's colouring-in page and character sheet to read over and get an idea for next time. I also asked them to come up with a name for their character, and pointed out that it didn't have to be their own name. I said that I didn't want to keep them in during -break time... only to be told that they would be happy to carry on working on their characters during break! Unfortunately, I had to go to lunch but would definitely consider extending our RP time into break if that works.

In under an hour, I was given this by our new sneak-thief:

Sneaky Thief

Our warrior assured me this morning that she did all her Hero Kids prep last night:

Sophie the Warrior

During my IT lesson with our Archer's class, he bounded up to show me this:

As yet unnamed Archer, but his player is thinking about what to call him

 Our next session only happens next week so I'm bolstered by their enthusiasm. My next task is to cut out, colour and fold a bunch of Giant Rat tokens, ready for the Basement O Rats adventure.

Everything I've linked to is from Justin Halliday's excellent Hero Kids.

RPing with Kids: The Ongoing Quest

At my school, the Junior Primary are lucky enough to have Clubs. Once a week, for 40 minutes, the Grade 2s and 3s are allowed to choose an elective club, run by a teacher. Usually the clubs are focused around a specific activity, such as Cooking Club or Music Club.

Last term I ran Coding Club, where a group of boys and I explored the web version of Lightbot. We all really enjoyed that as an introductory activity into 'thinking like a robot'. This term, I wanted something different.

Grade 2 and 3 boys problem-solving using Lightbot.

Roleplaying is one of my passions. I thought that I would try to use the medium of Clubs time to introduce roleplaying to my students. The name Roleplaying is a bit abstract to the 7-9 year old market I'll be targeting, so, the idea for Story Game Club was born. It's a bit convoluted but it does describe what I want to do- use a game to tell a story.

Clubs time is happening later today, so I wanted to do my write-up beforehand. I have found a system that will probably work great- Hero Kids by Justin Halliday. He has a great bundle on DriveThru RPG that is reasonably priced for the content included. I've chosen an introductory adventure, printed out the 10 prebuilt character/classes and read the simple core rules.

There is one thing that is concerning me, and that is number of players. Those of you that are familiar with RPGs will know that generally it's better to have a small group of players, 4 is ideal, 6 is maybe a push. As a school club, it would be better if I had a club concept that is 'open to all' in order to:

a) give all the students the right to choose their elective
b) ensure other teachers aren't left with massive groups to control

If I end up with 10+ students who want to do Story Games Club, then the concept for the Club will become unobtainable. I've worked on my pitch for today in order to try and draw the right students, and I've been given the nod to have a small group of 6 or so... I'm hoping I can draw these students into roleplaying and show them something new. I'll report back after our first session today.

Bonus picture of a Grade 00 and his bunny tower made in Sheppard Software: Paint and Make Easter Egg Hunt.