A new piece of software we’ve purchased is TTRockStars.  It’s a Times-Tables tester but put into a Rock Star context where you can earn money gigging, get new backgrounds, personalise your character and purchase new instruments.  It’s also done completely anonymously… meet Roxy Friedman (me!)

Class 3 and 4 have been using this a little over the year, but only when we purchased the new Chromebooks and showed them how to use the software did we notice that usage was up and their timing rocketed.   (Logins are stuck inside their homework or reading diaries and we’ll be rolling this out to the whole school soon.)

On Friday, we took part in the Bristol Rock Wrangle; these are just the same as a Spelling Bee, but for Times Tables.  The day was split into three sections before the quarter, semi and Finals, with the winning team being taken on a Rock&Roll helicopter ride over Bristol!  

Section one: Green screen photo session.  I’m looking forward to receiving these and sharing them on here!
Session two: Individual heats in the computer suite to gain children’s timings
Session three: Rock music with Teachers Rock Choir.  We taught Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ and Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’ in 3-part harmony and the children were dancing and doing actions too!  …Coming together afterwards, we had all 100 children and their teachers do a mass-sing of the songs and there were some air guitars too!

In between the Quarter Finals and the Finals, we had an Air-Guitar-off.  You’ll see from the photos and probably agree that Owen should have won, but an ending knee slide had another lad winning!

The finals… Blimey… they were shockingly fast!  The winner on the left here managed to tap into the keyboard 370 times-tables answers over the 3 minutes.  That’s two every second!  Suffice to say that our teams were amazed, inspired and fired up to do it again next year!  …and as I’m writing this, I can already see four of our children playing on the software this morning; three of them have just joined in the Festival event at Glastonbury!