Primary Teacher UK

Bedtime Stories Are Being Abandoned

Dads are abandoning the essential task of reading to their children. Recognised as a key ingredient in a child’s reading development this enjoyable task has fallen by the wayside with 57 percent of Dads. Seven steps to help dads overcome their fear in a simple guide to encourage them to read bedtime stories to their children. How to turn story reading into an educational game.

Point a video camera at anybody and ask them to say something and they inevitably clam up. It’s a natural reaction; most of us don’t want to take centre stage. And it is the same with bedtime stories. To help a child understand the story we should try to use different voices for each character, apply inflection in the narration and worst of all we have to read aloud!

It’s the end of the day, we’re tired, stressed, and certainly don’t feel the ideal person to read a story. Whereas mums at home tend to take the lead in early learning with their natural affinity with language development the bedtime educational story is still a vital support role that dad’s should play. Stories develop a child’s imagination, encourages literacy, self expression and an interest in reading – the backbone of all education.  

Step 1. Catch your breath, relax and take your time. No point in rushing as you will achieve little apart from disappointing your child and getting frustrated yourself. 

Step 2.Reading aloud may be awkward initially, with many of us inhibited by the thought of it. But it becomes a lot easier with practice. Speaking to a video camera involves ad libing or remembering some lines. Reading a story is easier as the script is right there before you. 

Step 3. Try and develop a different voice for each character. It helps add drama and your child’s understanding of the story. It makes reading easier for you and listening more fun for the children. 

Step 4. Add inflection to your voice to emphasise the action. Make it sound scary if the villain speaks or you are setting a key scene in the story. 

Step 5. Try listening to an online story. Many can be found on the web. Narrated by actors they tell the story with animated script and  give you a great idea of how to read a story out loud. 

Step 6. Show your feelings as you read the story, and ask questions to get your child to join in “What do you feel about that?” 

Step 7. Read some support books such as “Dad did it” by Chris Wakefield, and “How to enjoy reading aloud to young children” by Alison Shakespeare. 

You have probably presented a report or opinion at work, school or university. You may have loved or loathed the experience. Some people have a natural talent to present; others need a bit of encouragement. Do remember at bedtime you have an intimate audience of one or two delighted children who also enjoy their time with you. It induces some quality time with the kids, gives mum a break and acts as a great transition between work and home. With of practice you will really get to enjoy it. 

The literacy trust in the UK have shown that story telling has a huge influence in a child’s interest in reading. Their literacy skills gain a leap ahead, and their story telling ability, something that is essential in the learning process gets a real boost. And it could all be down to you and a little light fun reading. 

Alistair Owens http://www.keen2learn.co.uk

Learning Brain Europe Conference 2008

The next Learning Brain Europe conference takes place on 2 May 2008. This day-long, interactive workshop will explore innovative strategies for efective learning. The keynote session this year is Behaviour rules OK: classroom skills with Rob Long.

There are four key rules which help school staff to manage troublesome behaviour and support troubled young people. Together they:

*provide ways of redirecting and defusing interfering behaviours in a non-confrontational way

*offer ways of analysing classroom behaviour and learner behaviour

*show how problems can be changed into solutions so that all involved work co-operatively to improve matters

*The key message is that in an educational environment behavioural mistakes should be learning opportunities.

Other workshop sessions will include:

Rob Long – Behaviour rules OK
Teacher2Teacher – Engaged Learning
Case Study – Behaviour skills for learning (year 7), Bernard Hurst, Fallibroome High School
The workshop will be held at Fallibroome High School, Priory Lane, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK10 4AF

The cost of this exciting day long workshop is £180 + VAT, to include lunch, refreshments and membership of the new Learning Brain Europe online community.

For further details, please visit http://www.learningbraineurope.org

Outdoor Learning

There are 3 programs on Teachers' TV linked to outdoors learning coming up. They are exploring the possibilities and benefits of lessons based outside the classroom. One, with Comedy Dave from the Chris Moyles Breakfast Show, which should be good viewing.

Inspirations – Inner City Forest - Tuesday 25 March at 4.00pm (F) and 8.00pm

Highters Heath Primary in Birmingham, an inner city school, becomes a ‘Forest School’ by working with the City's Park Ranger Service to utilise a patch of woodland that has escaped the grasp of developers. Once a week, a park ranger leads small groups of children to the woods and shows them how to explore the world around them through play and problem-solving. The rangers believe that all schools in urban areas are never far from a natural setting, whether it is a local park or an abandoned allotment.

The Teaching Challenge – Comedy Dave Wednesday 26 March at 4.30pm (F) and 8.30pm

‘Comedy’ Dave Vitty is the award-winning chief writer and contributor to the Chris Moyles Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 1. Dave's challenge is to work as a teaching assistant with staff taking eighty pupils from a Hoxton primary school to the New Forest in Hampshire for a residential adventure holiday. The pupils include groups with autism and other special educational needs, and many pupils who have never been outside their inner-city neighbourhood before.

Resource Review – Primary and Secondary Outdoor Environment - Thursday 27 March from 4.30pm (F) and 8.30pm

These two Resource Review programmes - Primary Outdoor Environment and Secondary Outdoor Environment - consider resources that may help open up the world for teachers hoping to take their pupils outdoors. Experts John Rhymer, Worcestershire Children’s Services Adviser for Sustainability and Head of Bishops Wood Centre, and Jon Clarke, Deputy Headteacher at Walsall Academy, give their recommendations, while a roving reporter observes some of the resources in use. A panel of experts discuss the resources in detail.

Thinking Skills Contracts

This is a great site that my wife found while developing the thinking skills in her school.  The site, Think It! Contract Activities, contains a number of theme-based contract activities that incorporate a number of different thinking skills, strategies and approaches. You will find activities that use a variety of Tony Ryan’s Thinker’s Keys, Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences (SMARTS) and Edward deBono’s Six Thinking Hats, as well as other higher-order thinking skills. Graphic Organisers are used throughout these activities in different ways and for different purposes.  Most activities fit within the upper levels of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy.  You can read the Contract Activities Rationale for the principles behind the use of contracts within the classroom.

The contract activities are ready to download or print directly from your computer and come with a cover page for each student and a number of activities (15- 21) that promote divergent and creative thinking.  Activities can be printed out and made into activity books for each child or displayed in hanging pockets with children selecting the activities they wish to work on. Children work at their own pace and at their own ability level to complete thinking tasks.

Fantastic site - bookmark it now: http://www.kurwongbss.eq.edu.au/thinking/Contracts/contracts.htm

Using the Apprentice Planning

Even though I wasn't able to finish the Apprentice planning like I wanted Paul still managed to make some use out of it.  He's emailed what he did and I'd thought I'd share it with you so you can see the success he had:

The week before the children were told that they were to be given £5 and told that they would have to plan an enterprise that would try and make them the most profit possible (The incentive that any profit they would make would be spend on them really engaged them!). They then had a week to plan, purchase whatever they wanted to run a 'stall' etc on our apprentice day. Over the next few days chidlren planned their idea, sorted out advertising around the school etc

On the day itself the children had just under an hour to set up all of their 'stalls' We then set them a 30 minute time window where they could sell their products/run their stalls.  I invited the Y6 parents along as well as well as children from the other classes along.

It was organised chaos! The children excelled themselves with what they had organised, the other children from the other classes and the parents really enjoyed the experience.

Some of the ideas the children put together were:

Chocolate fountain (Always a firm favourite!)
White elephant stall
Guess number of sweets in jar
Teddy bear raffle
Lots of computer games set up on the whiteboards where the children paid to have a go using consoles such as Wii's, Playstations, dance mats etc eauty salon (nails being painted/facials etc)
Guess the weight of the cake
Wacky dohnuts (children had to try and bite the dohnuts off a suspended wire with their hands behind their head!)

The children had loads of other ideas planned such as throwing sponges at them in the stocks, radio controlled car races etc but due to the bad weather we had to run everything indoors! Which was a shame as I had already picked which hildren would go into the stocks! :-)

It was great just 'sitting back' so to speak and watching my class run the morning themselves.

They made £230 in the 30 mins we ran the event for! An amazing achievement considering we are only a 1 form entry school and that we ran it on a monday morning with lots of children forgetting to bring in money!

Once we took off all the £5's I gave them at the beginning for the 8 groups they made an overall profit of £190 between them!

I'm going to use the money to take them all to the cinema to see Harry Potter  and the Order of the Phoenix on the afternoon after their leavers assembly. (Which we are also basing on the Apprentice Theme!) We should even have enough money to stretch to buying some popcorn too!

It was a great experience both for myself and for the children. Its just a pity that its my last year in Y6 (moving to Y4 in sept) as it would probably have become a regular feature at the end of the year.

Well done Paul!

Wistonia University

This week we launched a new idea in our school. 'Wistonia University' is a brilliant way to bring the children, staff and community together to share skills and interests. The idea is that staff and volunteers run a course in something that they have a skill or have an interest. The children choose which courses they'd like to attend and then they are allocated a course from their top three. The courses will have a mixture of children from Year Three to Year Six.

The intention of the courses is that they should be vocational - to give the children a skill they can use in the future. All in all there are 25 course on offer: advertising, bricklaying, cake decorating, card making, clothes designing, dancing, floristry, hair styling, knitting, Italian, model painting, Paper crafts, Photo Story, Plant propagation, preparing a three-course mea, speech and drama, sports coaching, teaching, textiles, upholstery designing, water safety and basic first aid and woodwork. I was really proud today to see Wistonia University in action.

The adults were all pleased to be working with such a mix of pupils, delivering a course in something which isn't always possible to teach in the normal curriculum. The children enjoyed making friends in different year groups and learning something different. Download the prospectus if you'd like to find out more. Let me know if there's anything more you'd like to know.

Download wistonia_university_prospectus.doc 

More on Creative Curriculums

There is a speech on the DfES website today about the creative curriculum.  The speech, by Parmjit Dhanda, discusses how the Gloucester Excellence Cluster is raising attainment for pupils locally – and indeed beyond - through the City Curriculum. Its philosophy of hands on learning – children discovering for themselves how things work rather than just taking someone else’s word for it – is a sound principle for life as well as a route to good qualifications. And the ‘do less, but do it really well’ motto is making school less like hard work for both teachers and pupils.

Teachers TV already have a programme showing how the 'City Curriculum' has been implemented into Geography as well as another with two teachers explaining the curriculum. 

This type of curriculum is already common in primary school now, we're coming to the end of our first year of using the Bexley model.   But how is the fact that a number of primary schools in England are to become specialists - in the way that most secondary schools are now - as part of a pilot scheme from next term?

34 schools in clusters in different parts of England will specialise in music, modern languages, science, art and sport, and aim to hit raised test result targets.  Each cluster will get an initial £10,000, plus £65 per pupil for four years, £25,000 in sponsorship and £50,000 in capital funding.

Blooms Taxonomy

As a year 6 teacher and after reading Andrew's last post, I thought I would share some of the activities which we use across the whole of upper key stage 2, not just at this time of year, but throughout the term.

They are based on Bloom's Taxonomy, but also integrate De Bono's Thinking Hats and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. The children love using them and set themselves targets on how many points they can achieve. It works something like this...

The children are given the sheets on a Monday morning, with the activities printed on. We spend the first session of the day going through the activities and discuss some of the ideas that they may have. They are then given 2 - 4 days of the week to work through the activities at their own pace, in their co-operative learning teams. By the Friday, (and after using a huge amount of paper, glue and sellotape!) the children are ready to present their work to the rest of the class.

If you want to use the points system, we allocate 5 points to the Knowing/Understanding sections, 10 points to the Applying/Analysing sections and 20 points to the Creating/Evaluating sections. This is by no means set in stone and you could adjust these points to suit your needs.

You can download the Word files here.

Download investigate_a_book_the_bloomingsmart_way.doc

Download its_good_to_be_me_blooms.doc

Download spelling_blooms_activities.doc

Download the_spanish_armada.doc 

Analysis of Creative Curriculum

A while back I talked about how we are trying to introduce a more 'creative curriculum' into our planning.  At the end of last week I presented, with the deputy head teacher, feedback from the staff.  You can view a copy of the graphs which I presented.

My analysis was based on a simple set of questions which each teacher circled 1 - 5.  1 being strongly agree, 5 being strongly disagree.  (In hindsight this should have been the other was around!).  To make things easier I also coloured coded the bars with green being positive, orange neutral and red negative.

Have a look at the graphs (average and individual questions) with all classes / names removed and feel free to ask questions.

Neuroscience and Education: Issues and Opportunities

James has emailed me from the Teaching and Learning Research Programme to let me know about a new commentary called ‘Neuroscience and Education: Issues and Opportunities’ arising from the Thematic Seminar Series on this topic.

In this short booklet there is information on brain development, brain care and some very interesting reading on Dyslexia, Dyscalculia and ADHD.

For those interested in how the brain works can I also recommend 'How the Brain Learns' by David Sousa who is an excellent speaker if you ever get the chance to see him.  I saw him at the first Learning Brain Europe Conference and he's inspired me since to read more and more about the brain!