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.

Tracking and Predicting

This week coming up is where we set our attainment predictions for the coming session.Our Head of Learning Community worked with some software developers to come up with a prediction and tracking system. It uses a traffic light system so I can see when testing is due. Before we get to that stage we sit down and look at each stage and look at the individual children, working out where we predict they will attain over the next session. We input all the information, and depending on the information we have given, the software can give us a fairly reliable prediction. Within that prediction we may make adjustments for individual children.

We’re into our second year of working with this software. Initially there was a bit of worry that the computer would be running our attainment and that figures would be skewed. Now that we’ve used it however that suspicion has settled and I feel I’m much more on top of tracking and monitoring attainment. It will be interesting to see how this will fit with ACfE as it comes on line.

We have some early testing to get caught up with too, so it’ll be good to get this under our belt.

It’s that time of year when you realise almost a whole term has gone by and you’re running to catch up! As always we’ve had our share of good days and the odd crisis too since August, but I wonder how I would find it working in a different job. I wake up every day with something exciting and invariably new to focus on and can’t imagine what else I would rather do. It’s a privilege doing this job and I think as a leadership crisis looms on the horizon we should all be sharing that with aspiring Heads.