RME - Paul and Barnabas

This session we've based our RME Christianity focus on the excellent scheme of work from Primary Vision. The activities have proven lively and stimulating for the children and the discussions arising have been far better than those I've normally been able to achieve with classes.

Today we looked again at the story of Paul & Barnabas. The aims of the lesson, according to the scheme of work were:

* To continue the story of Paul

* To reflect on the children's experiences of friendship

I chose a slightly different path for the class' activity than that suggested ("create a series of frozen tableaux to represent Paul and Barnabas' 'holiday photos' ") by giving the children 'frames' and asking them to create a Polaroid style holiday snap with accompanying caption of the missionary work of the men in the story.

The children came up with the following:

Feedback books

This is an idea we've been trialling since October last year. In an effort to increase partnership with parents and to facilitate pupils taking responsibility for their own learning, each week - on a Friday morning - all pupils in the school consider what they've learned and achieved that week in relation to the learning targets from the week's lessons and "experiences."

They can, of course, choose to write about something they've picked up which was in outwith the planned outcomes and in many cases this is where the really valuable comments are to be found.

HMIe seemed to quite like this idea and its real beauty is in its simplicity: a duplicate book for every child. The fill out their slip, the teacher writes a formative (or sometimes just a nice, general) comment and the pupil takes the top copy home with the book remaining in school.

I'll post some examples later but comments and thoughts would be appreciated in the meantime.

More active language work...

Phew! We tired ourselves out today...French is an active language anyway, all that gesticulation and Gallic Shrugging (apologies for the gross generalisations). I digress...we were doing a bit on "body parts" today so we played (with a little artistic license) "tete, epaule, genou, pied" which scholars will recognise as "head, shoulders, knees and toes [sic]."

Much hilarity and excitment leading to a little bit of an active connection with the language they were looking at and ensuring the associated labelling task went fairly smoothly. Quick. Simple. Fun.

I never at any point claimed the, ahem, drawing of a person was any good...

Active learning in languages...

French and English to be precise. Today I attempted to enliven the (potentially) onerous task of looking at verbs and adverbs following a slightly less-than-succesful "Shared Texts" session yesterday.


Confusion seemed to have arisen over the nature of an adverb so I devised a game to get all the children to firstly write down a verb of their choice, then to mime it at the same time as the rest of the class were miming theirs. After 45 seconds or so, all the children stopped and returned to their desks to write down the verbs they had seen. They then had another 45 seconds to perform and watch again before a second chance to write down. Even with some children away doing other things today, there were still 15 mimes going on - a hard task to follow them all!



The class then shared what they thought they'd seen - a really useful exercise for two reasons: firstly they had the chance to say what they'd seen and maybe get it right but secondly - and perhaps more importantly - if they didn't get it right they were still having to generate a verb.


We repeated the task by having the class choose and adverb to accompany their verb action and the rest of the children were again invited to "say what you see."

"Sprinting", "Writing"and "Skipping noisily"

The New Poem (for 18 words)

This is a brilliant piece by Roger McGough, available in his book "Sky in the Pie" which we looked at as part of a "Shared Texts" lesson.

Here were our "Learning Intentions" for the lesson...

16th January 2008

We are learning to:
*analyse and compare poetic styles
*investigate and collect examples of wordplay

We’ll know we’ve succeeded if:
*we can say something about the relationship of the poem to the title
*we can make and re-make sentences of our own using only a set number of words

I'll type up and post some of what the children came up with in their "write out and cut-up" exercise by way of context as soon as I get the jotters back...

RME - active learning therein...

Hmm. RME, never (for me) the easiest of topics to enliven but we managed it on Friday. Looking at the story of Pentecost with P5,6&7 with the following learning targets/outcomes/"we are learning to" thingies...

We are learning to:

*understand the story of Pentecost

*use active learning to help our understanding

The task was - having heard the story - to find others with a card which would go along with your own, then find another and another and so on...each group (pinks and blues) had a "checker" card so it was someone's job to act as a sort of "peer assessor" and sort the rest of the group it to retell the story with their cards.

How is this going to work?

I'm not entirely sure of the best format for this, though I suppose I'll learn as I go along and amend procedures accordingly, in line with the very best principles of formative assessment and A Curriculum for Excellence, I'm sure you'll agree.

What I think I'd like to do is to put up postings which share the learning intentions and success criteria of a "learning experience" and to accompany this with photos/videos/podcasts showcasing what the children have been doing and how they've interacted with the experience.

This will allow me to make evaluative, formative statements or comments and this will - hopefully - enable me to inform my future practice.

Well, it sounds good...