Brainstorming Class Rules


Teacher to use Kidspiration or Inspiration Maps to record student’s ideas. Guide your students to group similar rules together and discuss which rules are more important to have.


Export the final brainstorm into your camera roll. Airdrop this image to your students. Students collaboratively create a Book Creator/Explain Everything project illustrating your Class Rules.

Export to Seesaw, Class Rules folder.

Give it a try!

Using G👀gly eyes for division in Explain Everything

A couple of weeks ago we used G👀gly eyes whilst learning about arrays. As the kids loved them, we brought them back to work on division.


Shown above are the different ways we have been learning to represent division. In case you’re wondering, MAD T is an acronym for Multiplication And Division Triangle. The students were starting to understand the correlation between the hands on G👀gly eyes and the representations. So, we extended them by adding in a monster story to match the G👀gly eyes. The kids loved it.

Give it a try!






Multiplication arrays in Explain Everything

We’ve just started learning about multiplication and I wanted the class to use manipulatives and record their learning on their iPad. As one of the benefits of a BYO iPad is that children can reflect on their learning at home.

I gave the kids a container with 20 googly eyes and paired them with a buddy.  Who doesn’t love googly eyes right!


I told them that we were going to use the googly eyes to make multiplication array. Each person was to collect four googly eyes and discuss with their buddy how they were going to organise their collection.img_1378

The next step, was to take a clear photo to insert in Explain Everything and crop the photo if needed. These kids are amazing at multi-step instructions!  Here is where the kids demonstrated the various ways they could represent the array.


We continued with a few different arrays and then I gave them a backwards task. I told the class that the answer was ’15’ and they needed to show me the array. It was great to hear the discussion between the buddies on trying to figure out the array. There were kids who showed 3×5 and others who showed 5×3. Perfect lead into teaching them about turnarounds in multiplication just like in addition and subtraction.

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I then told them that there is another array for the number 15. There were puzzled looks and lots of trial and errors and eventually one pair figured it out…


Now Explain Everything was the perfect App for the kids to flip the array vertically to demonstrate the turnaround. The perfect ‘light bulb moment’ that I love seeing in my students. To finish off the learning we labelled the document ‘My first array book’ to mark as their first learning experience with arrays. Here is an example of the finished product. My first array book

Give it a go!




Word Work with Explain Everything

I am a strong believer that when students do any Word Work activity it must be collaborative for them to get any benefit. One activity I love is explain your ‘Silly Mistake‘ in Explain Everything. As a teacher you get a quick indication if students understand their sort when they are required to explain their thinking.

  1. Students initially do a Table Sort with their cards and make a ‘Silly Mistake‘. My definition of a Silly Mistake is only making one or two mistakes, any more and you don’t know if students have made a Silly Mistake or lots of mistakes!
  2. Next students take a clear photo of their Table Sort and export the photo into Explain Everything.
  3. In Explain Everything students use the laser pointer to keep the audience focused on their explanation of their sort and their reasoning for the Silly Mistake OR leave their reasoning for their Silly Mistake for the audience to guess.
  4. Once finsished recording their voice, students export their video to Photos and share with a buddy OR upload to Seesaw for peers to view and guess the Silly Mistake.

Give it a go!



Graphing App Smash

What was initially supposed to be a graphing warm up, turned into one of the most AMAZING redefining activities I have taught. I have always thought of using the Numbers App with my Year 2 students but then dismissed it as it might be “too hard”. Well was I wrong!


As a warm up the students were asked to look at the food pyramid and make a picture graph in Kidspiration using the “Food Group” template under the Science tab.

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Students then exported their Kidspiration picture graph into the Blackboard to Write and Draw on iPad App to tally the food items in each food group.


From there students were going to use that information and make a bar graph using grid paper in their Maths books….HOWEVER, change of plan… I asked the students if they were keen to try something brand new, using an App they have never used before and were they willing to learn with me.

They all gave a determined ‘ YES!’.

We inserted the Blackboard image into the Numbers App and made a table with the information we had. Great! That was easy. All kids were keeping up. Next we deleted any empty columns and rows. A little tricky for some. So the students who were quick to grasp the concept became “experts” and were available to help others.

From there ALL that you need to do is select the table and click the + to add a graph. It’s that easy!


The kids wanted to do another one. So, we read the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar and the students created a table of the amount of fruit the caterpillar ate, which they converted into a graph.


Now we could have stopped there… however we didn’t.

The students took a screenshot of their spreadsheet and inserted it into Explain Everything to answer: which fruit did the caterpillar like the most and how do you know that? 


Give it a go!