Soapboxes, Itchy Coo and a new baby….

Today the Headteacher from another school in the Learning Community held our first Primary 3 rich task meeting. The primary 3 teachers across the schools in our Learning Community will be developing this over the next couple of months, they were all keen to get started. Next week is our first meeting about theP6/7 rich task. We’re going to link this  in to Malawi and our link school there and are hoping that as this goes forward we can fundraise as a learning community for Mary’s Kitchens in Malawi. Apparently it cost £6000 to set up a kitchen which provides daily porridge cooked by the Mums. As a school we’d get nowhere near that total but as a learning community it might be feasible.

We’re hoping to get the children really going for it with blogs during this rich task so they can link in with each other whilst carrying out the work. Full of good ideas – we’ll see how it goes and I’ll write more about this when we get started.

A new baby arrived the other day in school…. Our Apodo for enterpise pod baby arrived so it’s snuggled in a corner in P6 until we get time to do some development work and investigation of it. The children have been poking it a bit and are excited to see what’s inside! Also snuggled in the same room is a soapbox which appeared from the Southbank Centre in London. It’s part of a big art project. Inside was a golden envelope which the children opened. They are to make a presentation/film/sculpture something which can answer the question in some way. And the question is…..what makes us human? Now that’s a rich task!!

In the meantime I’ve been stuck to my laptop this evening word processing materials for our new reading books in P2/3. Last session we started using decodeable readers in P1, so this is our next development into P2/3. It may be elderly but we’ve gone for ORT as a follow on, cos we just like it! The P3 teacher and myself have been typing fast as we’re starting these next week! So far this term the infants have been working on class Scots Language book studies with books from Itchy Coo, but its now time to get the ORT moving. So we’re all a bit puggled! We set the attainment targets for P4 today, it was a long meeting with the class teacher, but worthwhile as we now know where we expect the children to get to by the end of the session.

And in the the middle of this we had other goodies going on – the Active Schools Co-ordinator was in working with the children and a team of art workers were working with P7. The children have been making these fab giant 3D models of areas of East Kilbride. They are on hilly bits of polystyrene about 15 cm deep and a metre across. I’m really impressed with them – they have little wooden houses, swing parks, roads etc