This fun activity involves children using Google Earth to find a variety of places or things around the world. They aren’t specific places per se, but generally places. Examples include a football stadium, cactus, iceberg etc. The idea of having generic places and things to find is that the children generally aren’t able to just do a text search. They have to actively seek and find! Children can either using a snipping tool or PrtSc (Print Screen) to save a picture of the place/thing or they could provide the coordinates of their find. This could either work as an individual competition - see who can find all the places in the quickest time. Or it could be done as a collective effort - the whole class working to find the different places before the time runs out. I hope your children enjoy it as much as mine did!

This fun puzzle involves children using Google Earth to find a specific letter of the alphabet. All the letters are made-up from different features on earth such as buildings and rivers. Each coordinate leads to a different letter. Once the children have recorded the letter, they can zoom out to find out and record what country it is in. Once they have all the letters, they have to rearrange them to make up the mystery word. You can see all the answers by selecting the text in both the country and letter columns and changing the text colour. They are hidden in plain sight, so don’t forget to remove them if you are setting this as a document online. This could either work as an individual competition - see who can find all the places in the quickest time. Or it could be done as a collective effort - the whole class working to find the different places before the time runs out. Children and adults alike really enjoy this activity! Extension ideas: a) Have the children find their own letters around the world, or for more difficulty, in their local area. b) Use the snipping or Print Screen (PrtSc) tool to copy images of letters and spell out a name or even a phrase.

This fun activity involves children using Google Earth to discover various famous landmarks from around the world. Examples include a mixture of man-made structures such as The Taj Mahal, and natural landmarks such as Ayre’s Rock. Children can ether type or copy the coordinates into Google Earth and then easily find the monument. Older students could even try to manually find the coordinates. Once there, they can explore the landmark following which they should record its name and country in the table. This could either work as an individual competition - see who can find all the places in the quickest time. Or it could be done as a collective effort - the whole class working to find the different places before the time runs out. It works as a great follow-up lesson to mapping and use of coordinates or even just as an introduction to Google Earth or an introduction to famous human and physical geographic landmarks.

This is a standalone activity I do in ICT to help chidlren learn how to create tables tables in Microsoft Word, select cells and shade cells with different colours. The children could even add text to a cell as part of the art or merge cells. In this document are four ready made examples of what sort of table/pixel art they could create whilst mastering these skills. You could provide them as examples or even provide the table outline as a template for the children to work on, although if they’re able to, it’s better to have them create their own table.

This is a fully editable A3 board game template which comes in both colour and black and white and also with a set of different sized question cards. Every part of the board game is editable. You can move parts where you like, type in the playing squares, adjust titles etc. All the children need are some dice and counters (which could be anything from a block to a coin). The question cards can be typed up by you or the children or you could print blank ones and they could write their own. The great thing about this game is it’s versatility. We use it to review anything from comprehension questions in literacy to word problems in maths. If a child lands on a question space, they select a question card and if they answer it correctly then they roll again. Also included on the board are snakes (for going down) and ladders (for climbing up). I’ve also included a few other fun ideas like a hospital square and different scenarios for landing on a particular square. Needless to say, the children love playing it and it’s also fun for them to edit it and create their own if there’s enough time.

A great way to introduce the basics of coding in the classroom - no computers necessary. The worksheet is made up of an example code that creates a route from the bottom to the top of a grid. There are then 3 further tasks for the children to complete which involve writing the code for the route as well as reading code and colouring the corresponding route. Extra idea: If you have tiled floors in your classroom or some accessible area of the school, then you can introduce the same concept using children as the players that move along the route. To add extra interest you could blindfold the player!

Students to follow the outline in the document to demonstrate that they can edit font type, font size, font colour and font alignment as well as make words bold, italicised or underlined in Microsoft word: