Have 3 trays (one green for objective understood, one orange for getting there but need more help or time, one red for don’t understand).

Children put their work in the tray that relates to their learning at the end of a lesson.

Could extend to children in the green tray picking up someone else’s work from a different tray and helping pick apart what they didn’t understand or couldn’t do (therefore giving the green tray child time to verbalise and consolidate their own understanding).

You can then extend this to getting the children to draw a circle, triangle or square in their books to self assess their own work or their partners to peer assess.

This stops copying of answers, gets an air of anticipation and keeps pace high. Particularly useful in phonics and maths sessions.

In other words the only person to touch the computer is the robot. The only person to decide what to do is the human.

After a set amount of time, switch over who is the robot and who is the human.

It seems that by counting down, a sense of urgency is created for the children and there is a lot less ‘slack time’ between whole class times and independent learning using this method. It has also helped to start from 5 and not from 10 (again increasing the urgency).

So if you don’t count when changing from one classroom area to another, try it and your lesson pace should stay high. If you count up and it isn’t working well, try counting down. Conversely, if you count down and it doesn’t work as you intend, try counting up!

If you are confronted with a child who has difficulty in smiling then make the smile you give them the biggest ever (stopping short of a Nicholas Cage from ‘Face Off’ style smile).

If you have children who have come in without a breakfast or are upset, take the time to help calm them, ground them and where necessary, feed them!

Then what is your morning routine? Is it something for the children to calmly get on with or will you have to constantly pick up on negative behaviours bringing the atmosphere right down? With one particular class I have taught I found I was doing the latter until I changed what I was asking them to do as a starter activity. They used to do handwriting practice until we switched to a whole class Mental Maths starter so instead of constantly picking up on noise levels, off task behaviours etc the same children were engaged in their Maths. I moved the handwriting session to a different time of the day and they coped a lot better (whilst still being far from perfect!). Of course, every class are different and my current class cope with a handwriting starter activity brilliantly, you just need to find what works for your class to create a calm and positive atmosphere right from the start of the day.

They are not intended to be purely useful to inexperienced teachers nor redundant for experienced practitioners.

The intention of the series is to offer opportunities to improve classroom organisation and therefore make a positive impact on children’s learning. I am not trying to suggest I have mastered it, far from it, I believe everyone can develop new strategies or refine existing ones to improve on their own practice, I certainly can. It is the process of trying something out, being reflective and deciding what worked for your children and scrapping what didn’t that will lead to a positive impact on learning, which is after all the entire purpose of classroom organisition in the first place.

The interactive videos that make up the resource can either be used whole class, in a group, for parents to support learning at home, for a child to go to during a lesson in order to support their learning or a teacher than needs help learning how to teach that skill themselves.

A package like Busythings lives and dies by the quality of it’s content. And it does not disappoint. Lively characters, engaging graphics and sound and a structure that clearly comes from good practice within the classroom creates an engaging and fun way for children to learn.

We have used Busythings consistently since the start of the year and together with Zondle, these two packages are helping support personalised learning and also give clear support to learners.

The control you have over setting exactly what you want your learners to engage in is fantastic. In the above screenshot all you do is click the phoneme/graphemes you want your children to learn up to and the software does the rest.

Another great feature is the ability to create your own resources linked to letters and sounds.

It is also important to mention Q&D’s excellent customer support. I explained a month or two ago that we were planning on investing in android tablets to use Busythings with and as the tablet technology was new I had found a couple of issues when using Busythings with it. They are now in the process of making it completely android tablet friendly

If your school are looking for a package that believes in the foundation stage ethos of each area of learning having equal weight (to be fair the four areas covered in Busythings are Creative Development, Knowledge and Understanding About the World, Problem Solving Reasoning and Numeracy and Communication, Language and Literacy) or if you are in KS1 and you have learners that clearly need additional early skills support, Busythings is definitely worth investigating.