Home Schooling Early Years ICT, part 1: Communicating using sounds.

I decided not to follow the same lesson plans for my youngest (DD2) that I’d developed for DD1, re-interpreted for EYFS standard. I don’t think it’s because she’s too young for the concepts that I’ve been teaching DD1, like copyright, communication styles, and researching techniques. I don’t think she’s interested.

To make ICT engaging for her, I decided to boil things down to a single theme, and to make the activities as physically engaging as possible. The theme I thought that would be the most applicable is how we communicate with each other, and how communicating using technology uses those same paradigms.

Lesson 1: Communicating using sounds

Objectives:

·       How sounds can convey messages

1.     Select lesson 1C The Information Around Us from http://www.learn-ict.org.uk/sow2006/ks1_menu.asp

2.     Listen to the sound snippets, and type what they are into the text boxes (underneath the player controls)

3.     Go for a walk outside and record sound snippets

4.     Challenge Mummy to identify the sounds

Typing the titles of the sounds into the text boxes turned out to be quite tricky for DD2, and challenged her with respect to several skills. The fine motor control needed to not jog the mouse whilst clicking in the text box proved to be difficult, but she improved with perseverance. Since she spells phonetically, (she is encouraged to sound words out at school), this led to many misspelled words. However, she learnt to identify these by the red underlining by the browser, and either had another go or asked me. Finally, we disagreed as to what one sound was, which led to a small debate, exercising her critical evaluation skills.

The physicality of walking through the village, recording sounds, really appealed to her. We both came up with ideas, and ended up with quite a collection (cars, aeroplanes, dogs, ducks, a pelican crossing, a cash register, and wind rustling through the leaves). Perhaps her most enjoyable part was to be able to fox Mummy with some of the more tricky sounds.

More in this series: part 2.