How can I make spreadsheets creative and exciting for y5 children?

[RacingSnake]

Hi. I am new to a job share in a year5/6 class. I have been given all the things that the main teacher hates teaching, among them spreadsheets. I also find it boring! Has anyone got any ideas to make it a bit fun, creative and interesting?

We find working out the price of football kit etc a bit samey - football is built into everything in the hope of motivating the boys.

I am at some point going to get them all to bring a pound and we will work out what we can buy for a party, then have the party, but has anyone got any completely different ideas?

I coordinate ICT so I should be able to but...........can't.
I know lots of people find them fun in their purest form, so I can guatantee that soeone in the class will be in heaven at the cleverness of it all.
www.lgfl.net/lgfl/leas/greenwich/accounts/subjects/ictteam/web/resources/primary/QCA%20scheme%20of%2 0work/qca%20year%205d/
This is a good ready made unit. I have used it before and no one fell asleep....

do one on poocket money or sweetie expenditure and bring real sweets in

Hi there why not try this site

www.teach-ict.com - best site on the web for ICT resources especially KS2/KS3

or if they already have a little knowledge go to nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/95805?uc=force_uj

Download the file and find pizza.exe (addition) and zoo.exe (subtraction)

Talk the kids through the games and the concept that it is quicker and more accurate using a spreadsheet

Then open a worksheet and divide page into quarters about 6 columns X 5 rows with each one a different bright colour

Name each one Addition/Subtraction/Multiplication/Division
then in one create a calculator using spinner buttons to control two cells and a formula linking them

Let them play with this and try changing the formulae then do another one with them step by step then if they get it they can complete the other two themselves
.
You can then use this to make a party budgeter quite easily

Plus if they like football think web queries linking your spreadsheet to football.co.uk league tables or other sports to bbc (they would have to be pretty able to do this without loads of support at KS2)

A few little brief ideas - hope they make sense

web queries make an updateable link between the spreadsheet and the internet (for all those who've never heard of them)so you get all the numbers from the table in the website and then you can get them to use these to create a graph of the points of their teams league (or pop charts)

guaranteed to have them opening spreadsheets long after you have breathed a huge sigh of relief and moved on

usually 'cause they are convinced that ONE day it just won't work

missyxx

PS calculator sounds boring but they seem to love it esp if they can format the cells to be pretty colours and garish fill effects

Thanks for the ideas, esp Missymousie. They make no sense to me at the moment, but I shall work on them when I have a spare moment and hope to come to understand them. A first reading stuck on the idea of the 'spinner' and the 'web query'. Need time to research!

dd (year 5) loved it when they did spreadsheets at school

her teacher told her lots of the mums and dads used them at work and people used them at home to manage their money and dd came back telling me she could sort out all my work problems for me

think they did pocket money, also how many pieces of fruit they had per day, silly things like that

but also some basic this is how much I earn, this is what I want to spend my money on, which they really enjoyed!

think they like it when you tell them that 'real' people use what they are learning iyswim!

Maybe you're right and they'll find it more interesting than I will!

Have a school toy sale - estimate proceeds (i.e. 50 items @ 5p, etc) then detail exact proceeds - you'll have to think about this a bit more, but I'm sure it could work!

Work out the cost of a class garden - buy the seeds, grow them. Investigate the cost for homework... that kind of thing an add multiply on spreadsheet.

School trip - work out cost (use format) per child (add through register, or multiply by total children)

Our Y5 teacher does all spring/summer mths with her garden.

I'm sure there are more....

You want lots of graphics and to do it all visually.

For example: have an image of a pizza and then a list of all the topics (images and prices). Children chose the topics and it gets added up. Introdcues the basic concepts.

Or Fantasy Football. You need to set up the paper work to chose from and have your scores sorted out for the coming ICT sessions. The children chose their team and get the ss to add it up to make sure not over budget. The weekly, add points and save each week. Mini comp within class to see whp has won.

I have 3 ss files here which are good visual ones for younger children to use. I used them with Y7 but this was a few years ago, so prob fine in Y5 these days. IOne is the pizza, one a disco and one a zoo.

If you contact me on claire.king13(at)btinternet.com I can send them to you.

I no longer have the worksheets. etc to go with them but you'd get loads of ideas from the sheets themselves.

My father taught my nephew how to use Excel in a very basic way by collecting rain in the garden for a month, measuring the rainfall every 24 hours, and then using the data to plot graphs.

So some sort of task where children have to collect data and input it and then use it to create charts and graphs? Apart from rainfall you could measure the outside temperature?

I love spreadsheets.......does that make me sad?

They are great & exciting & fab

You could also plot data about the children eg their shoe size, and then play with it by age (in months), sex, height and see whether you can draw any conclusions about possible correlations?

Plot data about their teeth - how many milk teeth they have lost, how many permanent teeth have erupted, their ages in months, their sex.

The 3 graphical ss I have here as excellent for What If questionng.

Pizza: What if I add a piece of hame and a tomato - how does it affect the cost? What if I change the toppings? If I have £3 to spend what combinations can I have?

Zoo: Budget is £100 - what combination of animals can I have in the zoo? If I have 4 elephants, how many lions can I have?

Disco: what combinations of people to drinks do I need to get the meter to go from sad to happy; what combination do I need to get the disco floor lights and the DJ music to start? What if I want the spot lights working? etc.

Much more fun and less dry than pure numbers, and a great intrduction to the concept behind a spreadhseet, which is essential really before you try and teach them how to set up their on ss.

Definately do some very interesting or funny data collection.

A bit humiliating but my teacher gave us all a quick maths test and then plotted our results against attendance for the year, to show that those who came to more lessons got higher scores. Amazingly it DID show this, and all the students were very engaged, but it wasn't a nice experience if I'm honest.

My DD was 9yo when we were in California for 2-3 weeks. The weather wasn't great so she collected a selection of stones from the beach. She put photos of them on a blog and asked people to vote for their favourite (I put links on all my internet forums) then she put the results into a spreadsheet and pasted a graph of the results onto the blog.

We linked up statcounter.com to the blog so we could see where in the world people's IP addresses were from and she loved it. In terms of IT skills it covered loads - the spreadsheet was just a small part really.

Wow! So many ideas! Am going to save them all and work through them in the holidays. Not sure about doing the maths test one - this is a difficult and hostile class (which is why the teacher wants to go part time and offload the tricky stuff!)

i did the old weather hting
plotted two VERY diffo places

then turned into graphs of highs and lows

Spreadsheets are ace. I genuinely love them. I build them sometimes to help me make tremendously important life decisions

Pivot tables have to be one of my favourite features of Excel, spesh how you can compare averages (mean, median and mode - woohoo!) and volumes alongside each other. And then pivot it all.

There's plenty of interesting sample data you can use to play with. Could you combine it with something from another curriculum area, so they get some decent graphs and whatnot out of it all? Ummm, compare the sizes of the Spanish and English navies inn the 16th century or something (prolly a crap idea, but you get the gist)?

Get them to produce some graphs using the data. Go into the formatting options, and choose fill effects. They can use pictures, effects or patterns as the backgrounds for their charts. If they find some good clipart it can look quite good in the background.

Good luck

Great ideas!

Have been refusing to think about it all Christmas, but now must start planning this topic. I have planned everything else and there is nothing left.

Have you got access to a Wii? Depending on the makeup of the class do either brain training or a spreadsheet of a wii sports day - works a treat with my class

Never actually seen one yet myself, but I am sure that the class has at least one each!