Sunshine silent sparklers

Well this blog post is  a simple last minute blog post for colleagues of mine who next week need to keep children calm or quiet during the KS2 and Y2 SATs week.i have just created this for one of my associates working in an open plan area.

We love sunshine sparklers as a way of air writing to practise new language and writing new or famillar words.

However this is "sunshine sparklers" with a difference.It is very easy to organise and probably a great last minute stand by for lots of times during the year .Children will be involved in reading familoar language, investigating unfamiliar language. looking up new language in bilingual dictionaries and writing words either from memory or with support.It is an activity that can be very simple for beginner learners or have added challenge for more advanced learners......

• Ask children to draw circles on a blank piece of paper to represent the centre of their sunshines,with sufficient room around the outside to add "rays " around the outside of each sunshine
• Give children an appropriate age and stage  language focus e.g adjectives to describe people, numbers , colours,clothes for a holiday , masculine nouns linked to food,  animals in a zoo , endangered animals, recycling verbs etc....
• Give younger children lists to look at and with more advanced or older children set them a blank sheet challenge.Can they remember words?Can they locate new words in bilingual dictionaries? Can they look up words to ensure spelling is correct?
• Now they need to design their sunshines.In the centre of the sunshine they should draw the item.
• Around the outside they need to write the letters of the word as the individual rays of the sunshine.
• How many sunshines can they fill their page with?
• Older children can then cut these out and oprganise them according to your categorisation criteria e.g. alphabetical order, numerical order , size order ,words in vowel alphabetical order- so first vowel in word determines the aplhabetical order of the words.Why not let them create a categorisation challenge of their own for their table or partners? 
• Younger children can cut out the sunshines as simple picture boxes and glue these  in their books to create a page full of sunshine words.