P7 Exhibition

The P7 teachers from our Learning Community had a day together last week to get to grips with planning the rich task they will be doing within class next term. They will be using Malawi as their background context. After a lot of thought they all agreed that writing is something they would like more time to work in depth with the children. So they have written a rich task which will allow the children to develop their writing skills. Their idea is that the children will produce written work over the period of the rich task – a booklet which incorporates a variety of writing related to myths/legends/writing in Malawi which the children have developed. They’ve produced this on the  template available from Argyll and Bute. Work has still to be done on this, they will meet again in December to look at how they will work with the children on more detailed planning and also how to set up their class blogs for the project. Then they will have weekly network support meetings during the duration of the task. It sounds very exciting.

Our P7 teacher has been working with her class on a WWII exhibition next week. They have taken over various bits of the school to display their topic work – writing, posters, art/technology etc and have invited in parents etc to see what they have been working on. They have made up great powerpoints on different aspects of the war and tell me they are going to make an air raid shelter somewhere in the cloakroom… The teacher is on her knees but she’s done some fantastic work on this!

We’ve been working on our attainment targets, and working out where we need to give additional support to our children. Last session we began trying out some prediction software and this has really allowed us to get to grips with individual attainment targets. Staff meet with me to discuss this etc. I’m hoping that what we are doing will help us challenge our children more. Where we have previously really concentrated on our headline figures eg A at P3, B at P4 etc and have been doing well there, we are now moving to challenging attainment results at higher levels to really challenge capable children who are not quite hanging on to the most able group. These are the children we need to push and give more support to now. This is encouraging and shows added value teaching. We have been lucky enough to get a Scotland Reads Volunteer and hope to use her to help us with this support for children.

http://del.icio.us/andrea_reid – Still can’t get this link to show up on sidebar though! It’s kind of annoying….

Despite my inability to use wordpress properly… RM are writing a case study about our ICT use at school. I’m so proud of the progress the staff have made in this area.

  P3 ICT work.