WATCHING TOO MUCH TV

I’ve  been very negligent recently with this blog. Due in part to watching 5 series of the wire over the past few weeks in spare moments while at the same reading David Simon’s related books about Baltimore.  

 Its great to hear about Jaye Richard’s success with her big lottery fund bid. This together with a Learning Community CfE bid for a  project she will lead on will give great opportunities for liaison work across the community, sharing good practice and continued roll out of some of the great work she’s been doing. You can read more about it on her blog. This will add even more exciting transition work to the Learning Community

Cathkin Community Nursery are  in the midst of a submitting a bid too, where they hope to roll out accredited courses in conjunction with SLC college for their parents. Building Community Capacity in action.

We’re in the run up to the first of the new HMIe inspections, and the first obvious thing coming out of this is already additional joint working. With CLD alongside secondary, the links and amount of work going on within one small area are phenomenal. At the last count CLD had identified 57 partnership organisations working alongside one secondary and with the local community. It will be interesting to see how the inspection week itself proceeds.

Caroline Gibson’s blog writing about her visit to Malawi has been an inspirational read. After loving working with her at Castlefield, I’m really chuffed she is now a glow mentor on secondment for SLC and is already out and about in her additional capacity of CfE developmentwork, moving forward links with establishments on Malawi. She was out at Hallside Primary the other day in one of the Rutherglen/ Cambuslang Learning Communities where they have previously had successful links with Malawi.

Loch and Cathkin Primary have had a running start with their P1s – the teachers and SMT members have already put in an immense amount of work developing numeracy materials for planning in P1. All P1 classes in these 2 schools will be 18 or under as part of SLCs reduction of P1 numbers work. They are working on baseline assessments using tools such as PIPs and the Leuvin scale looking at engagement. The work will develop over the session.

Writing continues to be an area where many establishments have been looking at improvement work and I’ve been really impressed by the Ros Wilson materials – Big Writing  -from East Dunbartonshire where they take forward the VCOP approach – I was even more impressed by the amount of free downloadable resources to support VCOP I managed to find with a little bit of googling!

We held our Early Years Area Forum the other day which was hosted by Oakwood Nursery one of the partnership nurseries I visit. We had a good evening with input on persona dolls from Liz Mercer (you can read about the work she has done with her team in the LTS Early Years Matters Magazine) and a great tour round their newly built 0-3 facility – everyone had their notebooks out scribbling down nice ideas they saw!

So enough of this – back to my wire dvds….

Persona dolls

Liz Mercer at Cathkin Community nursery has recently had an article published in Early Years Matters on LTS site about their use of persona dolls. I was interested today when I picked up some of the feedback from her parents on this initiative. Here’s a small selection –

“The use of Persona Dolls seems an excellent idea especially in our multicultural society. It can only be good learning for the children”

“we are particularly appreciative of the cultural awareness aspect of the learning experience to be gained by using persona dolls. It is clear that using them gives learners a good headstart in life in order to tackle the constant challenges that they face throughout life.”

“It makes it easier for the kids to express themselves and foster an imagination with the persona dolls”

“Very engaging and useful method”

“Valuable life skills”

Persona Dolls

As always Cathkin Community Nursery in the Rutherglen/Cambuslang Area are doing just great. This is an article in Early Years Matters about how they use persona dolls

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/earlyyearsmatters/confidentlearners/personadolls.asp