Seomra Ranga / Edware Competition
Seomra Ranga is delighted to team up with Edware Interactive Learning (http://www.edware.ie), an Irish company, to bring you a competition on the website for the month of November. Edware is sponsoring prizes of their hugely successful geography software programmes Know Your Ireland (two copies) and Know Your Europe. Edware also produces the Know Your World and Know Your USA programmes. All these programmes are especially suitable to be used on an IWB for whole class teaching. They also feature lots of activities based on the content of each programme.
To be in with a chance of winning one of these three prizes, all you have to do is upload a resource to the Seomra Ranga website during the month of November. Simply attach the resource, in any format (.doc, .ppt, .pdf, .xls, .pub, .jpg etc) to an e-mail and send it to info@seomraranga.com You can enter the competition as many times as you wish – one e-mail = one competition entry. The only condition is that you must have created the resource yourself and not received it from someone else or downloaded it from another website.
So if you have documents, lesson plans or classroom resources that you have created, please consider sharing them with others through the Seomra Ranga website and be in with a chance to win an excellent piece of software. It is Seomra Ranga practice to credit the creator of a resource on the website. If you would prefer not to have your name with a resource on the site, please indicate this on your entry e-mail. So get uploading your resources during November.
Website Downtime
Working with IT can be frustrating sometimes! Just when everything is running along smoothly, a glitch hits the system when least expected. This is what happened to the Seomra Ranga website last week. And as Murphy’s Law would have it, the glitch happened when I was out of the country. It appears that the Seomra Ranga website just got too busy during the month of October with more than 51,000 visits. This also co-incided with teachers looking for resources in the run-up to Hallowe’en. Due to the level of downloading, the allocated bandwidth of the site was exceeded and access to the site was automatically blocked. This is the first time that this has happened to the site – looking positively it may be an indicator of the success of the site.
I only became aware of the access problems to the site after I decided to check in with Education Posts during the week to see what was happening in the education world in Ireland. A swift e-mail to my host provider, Lets Host, and they worked immediately on getting the site back up and running. For the longer term, the bandwidth issue will be resolved to eliminate the possibility of this happening again. So everything is back to normal and hopefully the gremlins will be happy with their Hallowe’en surprise for Seomra Ranga and stay away for a long time to come!
Hallowe’en Wordles
Check out the new Hallowe’en Wordles that have been added to the site today. They are based on Hallowe’en, Hallowe’en Food, Hallowe’en Creatures and Oíche Shamhna. Enjoy!
View these resources HERE>>>>>
New Hallowe’en Resources
A number of new Hallowe’en resources have been added to the Seomra Ranga website today. They include a set of flashcards of spooky Hallowe’en vocabulary; two new Hallowe’en themed door signs; a Hallowe’en themed writing frame; two new large and small 1-20 number lines with a Hallowe’en theme; all eleven Dolch Word Lists, each list with its own Hallowe’en theme. I hope teachers find these useful and practical for the classroom. If you have any resources for Hallowe’en in the classroom, please send them to info@seomraranga.com and I’ll upload them to the site to share with others.
8 Year Olds With iPods in School
What happens when you give a class of eight year olds an iPod each in school? I found out about this video through Twitter from @simonlewis. It’s amazing what educational uses iPods could be put to in a classroom. Could this ever happen in Ireland?…
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2nd Birthday
Seomra Ranga recently celebrated its 2nd birthday. Those two years have flown by. When starting out, I never expected that the site would be so successful. September is usually a busy month for the site for obvious reasons with teachers preparing for the new school year and looking for resources for their classrooms. There were 54,000 visits to the site this September, an incredible figure given that the site is only two years old and that the site is not advertised anywhere – people seem to have found out about Seomra Ranga by word of mouth alone. The plan for the next year is simple – to keep on producing free resources that are relevant to the primary school classroom especially in an Irish context. The most popular areas of the site are the Gaeilge section and the blog. Teachers constantly remark that they like the site especially for the Gaeilge resources as there are very few sites on the internet that provide Gaeilge resources. Gaeilge resources will continue to form a large part of the site for this very reason. So after two very busy years, it’s still enjoyable providing free resources to Irish teachers. Here’s to year 3!
Water Safety Resources
Seomra Ranga is pleased to announce that it has received permission from Irish Water Safety (IWS) to include their powerpoint classroom resources on the site for teachers to download freely. These resources should be of great benefit to primary school teachers to use in the classroom. It should be emphasised that all of these resources were entirely created by IWS and they remain the copyright of IWS. I am very grateful to IWS for being so generous to allow these resources to be made available to teachers through this site. read more…
17 Martin Street
Published in 2008, “17 Martin Street” is a novel by Marilyn Taylor, the same author that wrote the very successful book “Faraway Home”, with which many teachers will be familiar. Having thoroughly enjoyed “Faraway Home” and used the novel with a sixth class some years ago, I was eager to read this book which I only came across recently. Taylor revisits the same theme as “Faraway Home” for this novel, as it centres around the lives of Jews in Ireland during the period of the Second World War.
The setting this time shifts from Belfast, as in “Faraway Home”, to Dublin. Twelve year old Hetty and her Jewish family move into number 17 Martin Street in inner city Dublin during the winter of 1940. Ben lives with his family in number 19 Martin Street. Jews and Christians live side by side and the novel shows how they co-existed in an atmosphere of hatred, suspicion but also in a spirit of co-operation for the common good. read more…
Anne Frank
“Anne Frank” is a picture book written by Josephine Poole and illustrated by Angela Barrett. Rather than being a picture book version of the original diary, this book tells a third hand account of the life of Anne Frank. The language used in the re-telling of the story is relatively easy to understand and would be suitable to be read to younger children or for pupils in middle class standards to read for themselves. The book outlines the main points in the life of Anne Frank without going into too much detail, which makes it ideal to introduce the story to young children. The book is thirty pages long and the text is interspersed with beautifully created illustrations which are very evocative of the the period of WWII. This book would be a great resource for the teacher when teaching about WWII through the story of Anne Frank.
The back cover of the book carries an endorsement by the popular children’s author Jacqueline Wilson: “Exquisitely and imaginatively illustrated, this is a sensitive retelling of the moving story of Anne Frank”. The book is published by Red Fox, an imprint of Random House. (see www.kidsatrandomhouse.co.uk) ISBN 978-0-099-40976-2 The book cost €6.65 in my local bookstore.
See also other Anne Frank resources on the Seomra Ranga website:
Lots More Visitors
Lots more visitors have been visiting the site and downloading some of the free resources available on the site and in the last couple of days, the number of visitors to the site has exceeded the 300,000 mark. The site has been busy in the last couple of weeks with the return to school at the beginning of the month with an average of 2,000 visitors a day. Lots of new resources are being added all the time and you can keep up to date with new resources through the site blog (https://seomraranga.com/blog/), the Seomra Ranga Twitter site (http://twitter.com/seomraranga), on the “New Signs and Posters” section on the homepage or on the “What’s New?” section of the homepage.