Welcome to Seomra Ranga, the Hub for Primary School Resources. For the overseas visitors “Seomra Ranga” means “classroom” in the Irish language.
Seomra Ranga has been successfully providing tried and tested resources for primary school classrooms since 2007. Since that time, the site has gradually built up a strong following amongst educators as a repository of quality teacher-created resources. The resources on the site, which support all areas of the curriculum, are arranged in accordance with the curricular provisions of the Irish primary school….
Please have a browse through the new site and support our work in developing new resources by becoming a Member. Individual and School Memberships are available.
1500 Resources On Seomra Ranga
Seomra Ranga has reached another milestone with the recent addition of the 1,500th downloadable resource to the website. The resources cover all areas of the curriculum and are free to download. Most of the resources have been created by Seomra Ranga but some have been generously donated to the site by other teachers. You too can add to the resource bank by simply sending a resource that you have created as an attachment on an e-mail to info@seomraranga.com . I’ll upload the resource to the site so that it can be shared by everyone. Here’s to the next 1,500 resources!
Election Resources
Election time is fast approaching with the impending Local Elections, European Elections and the two Dublin By-Elections. This provides the teacher with a great opportunity to use the election atmosphere around us to teach about Ireland’s democracy and the electoral process. Seomra Ranga has produced some new resources to enable the teacher to effectively teach about the electoral process. The resources are contained in an “Elections” special page on the site. Some of the resources, which are free to download, include:
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flashcards of election vocabulary
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elections vocabulary word wall
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a booklet on Ireland’s Democracy
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flashcards of Official Offices that people can hold in Ireland
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posters of the leaders of the main political parties in Ireland at the moment
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flashcards with the names of the main political parties
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flashcards with vocabulary relating to political issues which may be heard during political discourse
Election Day is June 5th so it is opportune to discuss with middle and senior classes in the primary school all about elections and the voting system in Ireland. Why not try having a mock election in your school? Find out the names of all the candidates in your area, make up a ballot paper and hold the mock election. You could then set up a count centre and show how the system of proportional representation (PR) operates. I did this many years ago in a large school and it worked out really well.
Classroom Rules Rhyme
Nice colourful rhyme to teach pupils some classroom rules. Suitable to be displayed in the classroom.
(.doc file 158KB)
(Source: Ciara Mulcahy)
Website
Seomra Ranga recently reached another milestone in its development when the number of visitors to the site passed the 200,000 mark. This figure is even more remarkable considering the fact that the 100,000 mark was only passed towards the end of November 2008, meaning that another 100,000 have visited the site during the past three months.
Online since September 2007, Seomra Ranga has continued to develop and offer more and more free classroom resources for the primary school teacher. Developments during the past year include the range of new colourful posters across many curricular areas and the development of the “Christmas @ Seomra Ranga” website, both of which have attracted many visitors. The seasonal aspects of the site also attract many visitors depending on the time of the year.
I’ve had requests from some teachers to create specific resources for the classroom, and suggestions like this are always welcome. If you have a suggestion for a resource or a general suggestion for material that you think should be included on the site, please let me know (info@seomraranga.com) and I’ll do my best to oblige. Of course, I’m always appealing for new material that has been created by other teachers for the site. I’ve had donations of some really good and practical resources recently (the Naomh Pádraig Powerpoint and the Normans Powerpoint spring to mind) which I was delighted to receive and share on the site. I’d again appeal to teachers using the site, that if you download a free resource, that you return the favour and share a resource of your own through the site. The only requirement is that you have created the resource yourself, and that if you use material in the resource which was created by others, you should get their permission and/or acknowledge them in the resource.
Regards to all visitors to the site and hopefully we’ll have the next 100,000 visitors before the end of the year.
Resources For Easter
A number of classroom resources on the theme of Easter have now been uploaded onto the Seomra Ranga website. These resources include visual arts lessons; posters that detail the story of Easter; posters on the stations of the cross; posters giving the names of the different days during Holy Week; Easter worksheets; Easter word wall; flashcards with vocabulary about Easter; loop cards using Easter vocabulary; seasonal door signs for all class levels.
All the resources are free to download. However, I would ask that if you download a resource, that you upload another in return to share with others.
Quiz As Gaeilge
This week’s RTÉ Guide has a nice free CD-ROM of a “Quiz as Gaeilge” which is very appropriate for Seachtain na Gaeilge this week. The CD is appropriate for the senior end of the primary school or for a Gaelscoil. Instructions on how to use the CD are provided in Gaeilge and in Béarla. On the CD there are Ceisteanna Bunscoile (Leibhéal 1 & 2), and Ceisteanna Meánscoile. The ceisteanna are arranged in categories that you can choose: Teilifís & Scannáin, Eolas Ginearálta 1,2,3, Eolaíocht Ghinearálta, Tíreolaíocht Ghinearálta, Ceol. Alternatively, you can choose to answer Ceisteanna Fánacha (random questions) from all categories. It says that there are 100’s of questions on the CD.
This CD is suitable for use with senior pupils in the primary school either using a digital projector or running the CD on a PC. The answers have to be typed in and once you have entered an answer for all questions you can then choose to look at the correct answers to see how well you have done. This is a great resource for use in the primary school at any time during the year but especially during this week of Seachtain na Gaeilge.
St. Patrick’s Day Resources
New resources for the theme of St. Patrick in the classroom have been added to the Seomra Ranga site. There’s an excellent Powerpoint presentation telling the story of Naomh Pádraig as Gaeilge; there are flashcards to accompany the St. Patrick story and the scéal Naomh Paádraig; there are seasonal door signs for all class levels; St. Patrick Word Wall and three sets of St. Patrick Loop cards. All of these resources can be downloaded for free.
My Class Blog
This is my first year blogging so it’s very new to me. However, I’m surprised at how easy the whole process is to use. So, after starting the Seomra Ranga blog, I decided to see what it would be like to start a blog with my 2nd class this year. After reading and gaining encouragement from some posts on the Education Posts forum, I decided to set up a class blog with Edublogs (http://edublogs.org/) which allows you to set up blogs specifically for teachers and students. A blog set up with Edublogs is also less likely to be blocked by the Schools Broadband Network.
Setting up a class blog with Edublogs was really easy and it was ready and organised within minutes. All you have to do is sign up on the homepage, select a name (eg. http://myblog.edublogs.org) and the blog is set up. You can then choose from a selection of templates and customise them as you please. The Dashboard (the area where you compile your posts) is also really easy to use. You simply give each post a heading, type in the post, give it some tags (these are just keywords to describe your posts to allow the blog to be searchable), and click “publish”. It’s as easy as that! Adding media to the blog is also just as easy, although I have to admit that it’s mostly just pictures I put on my class blog. To insert a picture, you just click the image icon, find the picture on your computer and choose to upload it. A thumbnail will be automatically be created and added to the gallery of your blog, and you then just choose to insert it into the post.
My pupils are really enthused about the whole idea of having work published to the world via the class blog. The revised curriculum asks that when children are writing that they write with different audiences in mind, and what better audience than the whole world! The way I work it in the class is that I usually get the pupils to work in pairs to write a post about a particular piece of work that we were doing in class or in the school. They write their post on sheets of paper from our reusable paper box, so they know there is no great compulsion on them to have their joined writing at its pristine best (even though they are really good at their cursive script which they only started in September). Spelling also is not a concern which allows the pupils great freedom to write. You also get to see great editing work done on these sheets of paper as there tends to be lots of scribbling out, words changed, words added in. I then usually work with the pairs in typing the post into the blog in class.
However, it’s at this stage of the process where I run into some difficulties. Our broadband in the school is really poor and it sometimes takes ages for a post to upload, sometimes it doesn’t upload at all. More often than not, I end up typing the posts with the pupils into a MS Word document, bringing the document home and uploading it there where it uploads straight away with no difficulties. I have already abandoned the idea of trying to upload any images/pictures to the blog in school, so I just automatically just bring these home and upload them there. Of course, this does take the whole immediacy of blog posting away from the pupils but with the strength of the broadband connection in school so poor, I really have no choice. This is a shame but I’ve already wasted so much class time just waiting on posts to upload in school that it just cannot be justified any more. On the positive side, the pupils really get a kick out of seeing their art work, their written work or their photos on the blog, and of course it’s almost like a form of Cuntas Míosúil! Setting up a blog with Edublogs is free, however just before Christmas I found out that I had almost reached my 20MB quota of webspace. You have two options: you can delete some of the earlier posts or you can become a “Supporter” and have 5GB of webspace. I went for the former option as I didn’t like the idea of getting rid of some of our earlier work after all the effort that had gone into creating it. Becoming a Supporter also means that you get some extra functionality (which I mostly don’t use) and it also means that you don’t have any advertising on your blog. The cost of this I think was around €29.
Hopefully, this post may encourage other teachers to keep a record of work done in the class by using a blog as a medium to do this. Our class blog is not by any means the best in the world as both pupils and teacher are learning the process as we go along. However, we are proud of our small contribution to the web and have had good fun so far this year blogging. Have a look at our effort here:
