Using felt tips

Now, usually, I am not a fan of the felt tip in my classroom. Many children have been sent back to their seats, shoulders dropping with a disappointed air, having been informed that I do not accept felt tips in exercise books. The ink sinks through the paper. When you make a mistake, it’s irretrievable. The yellow never stays sunny yellow. The reasons are many.

But. It has to be said that there is something about them that is immensely attractive, and especially so for children. The colours are bright and cheerful, the marks they make (when new to new-ish) are bold and assertive. And, thanks to the scratchy nature of their contact with paper, the sensory feedback you get when you write with them, similar in nature to a good, soft-but-not-too-soft pencil, is strong.

So, after quelling my qualms about inky fingers, and in the interests of reluctant young writers (for a number of reasons), I have come up with ways in which the felt tip can be used to, if not aid illustration (I will leave that to my more artistic colleagues), the aid the development of writing.

Contain the mess 

There is no way around the fact that felt too is messy, so I recommend you gather together some exercise books that don’t matter. Someone always has some odd, small number of empty books hangi around their cupboard somewhere. Seek these out and put them to good use. This way the children can go through the pages, experiment, smudge and generally make a mess and it won’t matter.

Make patterns

I often like to allow two colours (and children love to choose their combinations, haggling over an extra colour, or two, or three), and this makes felt tip writing the ideal medium for finding the patterns in words the children are learning to spell.

Make a wordle

Who needs a wordle when you can write your own on a big piece of paper and your teacher puts it in the wall for everyone else to see your handiwork?

Self/peer marking

Not got any highlighters? Use a felt tip to underline (in the correct colours) instead.

Free writing 

Sometimes, just the fact that you are being allowed to write in felt tip is enough to get even the most reluctant little writer to write pages and pages and practice lots and lots of spellings. All over the page in lots of different sizes.

Keep the best ones tidy

There is always a tray full of old felt tips – and a great job for those children who are longing to help you during playtime is to check which ones still work and throw out all the ones that don’t – but keeping a pot of the very nicest ones for writing makes all the difference to young reluctant writers, especially if they know that being allowed to use them is a special treat.

Just make sure, especially if you are a roving teacher, that you label everything and put them safely away in a place where none of the other adults in the school know about. And make sure the children put the lids back on. 

These are just a few of the ways you can use felt tips for writing. I’m sure you can find lots more uses of your own.

SEND for Beginners

Last Saturday, I led a session on the SEND Code of Practice, for teachers and school leaders who were interested, and wanted to know more about SEN, what it all means, and what their responsibilities are, at TLT16 Southampton.

It was a fun session (well, it was for me, anyway), partly because I decided to go ‘old school’ and abandon any thought of using a powerpoint presentation (so I can’t give you a link to it here), and teach, like I would in a classroom.  I wanted to do three things – and I hope I succeeded.

1. Challenge the idea that people who teach children with SEND, or SENCOs are somehow magical human beings.  They aren’t.  They are just ordinary teachers, some of whom have a particular interest in the field (often these are people who are fascinated by how people learn – or not – and often they have a family connection to disability in some form), some of whom have found themselves stepping up to the plate because no one else wanted the job.
2. Ensure that attendees knew some key information about the Code of Practice and what it means.
3. Give attendees a bit of time to talk to each other about any students that were causing them concern, and pool ideas about how they might go about removing barriers.

Key Areas

I split these into three main messages.

1. Every teacher is a teacher of special needs.  I really can’t say this enough.  Basically, this means that the class teacher needs to take responsibility for ALL of the students in the class.  The ones with SEND do not belong either to the SENCO or to the TA, but to them – and they need to get informed.  If there is an EHCP or Statement, they need to read it.  If there are short term targets to be written, they need to do them.  They need to teach the children themselves.
2. Categories of need – what they are and what they mean. There are four categories of need in the Code of Practice; we spent a little bit of time going over what they are, and what sort of need they cover, but the main idea I wanted to get across was that just because a child has a label/diagnosis, this does not mean they only have one area of need.  Depending on the child, they could have needs that span all four categories.  Teachers need to abandon any thought of neatness where SEND is concerned, and embrace several dimensions, lots of slipperiness, and considerable grey areas.  We also discussed the line where SEND and not-SEND meet.  A bereavement, for example, will give a child an additional need, but it is likely that this is short term.  EAL on its own is not an SEND, and EAL children will, in the main, require a different form of teaching.  A child who is poorly with, say cancer, and who has been/is likely to be poorly long term, will come under the disability legislation and be covered by the Code of Practice.

3. Removing barriers and the social model of disability.  Despite the need to demonstrate needs and diagnose, the Code of Practice is built on the notion of the social model of disability, which says that it is not so much the disability that makes life difficult for a person, as the world, and society that surrounds them.  Other people’s attitudes towards them, and the lack of adjustments to the environment in which they live are the things that make life hard.

As teachers, we are in the business of removing barriers to learning – and this is something that we do every day.  Every time we move a child away from a chatty friend, every time we shut the curtains against the glare of the sun in the afternoon, every time we ask for quiet so that we can concentrate we are removing a barrier to learning.  It is what we do.  The only difference with SEND is that we might have to think a bit harder about what the barriers a child is experiencing in our class actually are.  Then we can go about making adjustments.

After all that we indulged ourselves in ‘Nancy’s Great Acronym and Edubabble Quiz’ (where I mourned the fact that a G&T is no longer something to be enjoyed with ice and lemon).

 

If you would like me to come and talk to you or your colleagues about SEND and the Code of Practice or issues around inclusion, please do get in touch.

 

You can buy my book, Inclusion for Primary School Teachers here

Thank you Rob Webster, for being my ‘glamorous assistant’ (ie. tall!) and sticking labels on the wall.  Well done Michael Slavinksy for giving the blu tac back ;P