Bognor Observer!

It has been confirmed today that the Bognor Observer will be sending a photographer to our private celebration in January! We feel that this will help create an atmosphere where the children can be proud about what they have achieved over the last couple of months!

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

Making the School Newsletter

The school have been extremely supportive with our project over the past couple of months. They were extremely excted when Hugh Dennis visited our Yr9 pupils and the project was featured in the December Newsletter. See below...



© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

Review and feedback from the Yr 9 pupils and JW (staff)

The review and feedback will be posted asap!

 

We are sorry for the delay.

 

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

Exciting update - example of the News and Weather feature!

Click here to hear the audio clip from Diverse FM. An excting sneak preview of the radio podcast: News and Weather!

 Watch this space for the finalised podcast!

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

Wednesday 8th December

Wow! An emotional day, as it was our last official lesson with the Yr9s. A fabulous day none the less and the children excelled themselves with creativity and flair!

It was very apparent how the children have all grown in confidence in not only their speaking and listening skills, but also as people. The last two weeks has really been an exciting time for both the Yr9s and us, which is definitely evident in what they have produced.

Today they started by finishing last week’s features: Sport, Gossip and News. They were then able to critique their work and many of them reflected on their feature to help them improve their second.

All the children finished their second feature before lunch: Weather, Comedy, Interviews and Soaps. This enabled us to decide as a group the ordering of the features and to choose their songs.  We also had the opportunity of evaluating the project with the children, and they made video blogs about their feelings (these will be posted in the following blog).

Over the past 7 weeks we have watched the children grow in confidence; from their interviewing and questioning skills, to working as a team with peers they may not have necessarily chosen to work with. We all felt that they really worked well to accomplish a lot in one day and the most important part of today was that they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. A great achievement for all of them!

We also spoke about the Fantastic Finish with the children today. In January we will have a private celebration with selected guests: from the school, university, parents, governors and hopefully external people who have helped inspire the children. The celebration will enable the children to introduce their pilot radio broadcast for Diverse FM. The outcome will hopefully mean that the school will continue the radio station with our special group of Yr9s to becoming the experts!

We will now just have to wait in anticipation for the Fantastic Finish in January!

To view the lesson plan click here.
To view the powerpoint click here.

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

Wednesday 1st December

Today’s session was intense and really challenging for both us and the children.  The children worked in small self selected groups to plan and record their first section of the radio broadcast.  The morning was spent researching information to go in their sections and the children used their knowledge of each genre effectively.  Some children worked really well and started recording in the morning session, while for others the process took longer. 

One group worked on a celebrity gossip feature.  Lots of time was spent finding the right stories and they found it quite hard to keep to deadlines and work under pressure.  Another factor in this group’s difficulties may have been the size of the group; they worked in a four whereas other groups were pairs.     Some groups had more straight forward genres to work with, for example news and sport.  The children persevered and all groups finally finished their planning and recording for their first sections today.   

Some of the difficulties for the day were:

-          Failure of some recording equipment;

-          Finding quiet space to record;

-          Working together; and

-          Confidence to record and listen to their own voices.

We tried to overcome these difficulties, for example, by adapting to the equipment that we did have available and changing our initial plans.  We all got a bit stressed and it tested our team work skills as teachers.  This definitely gives us things to contemplate for the next session to ensure that we minimise any problems next time. 

Despite the struggles of the day, it ended well with a preview of the final podcast.  We listened to B + G’s news section and it sounds really professional.  We are all very impressed!!

Here is a section of the girls' celebrity gossip script that they planned and researched:

Headline:  One Direction's Harry Styles' has new model girlfriend

One Direction star Harry Styles is reportedly dating an older woman - a 23-year-old model called Syanne Patterson, who he met backstage on The X Factor.

One Direction hunk Harry Styles, 16, is said to have been spotted snogging 23-year-old model Syanne Patterson for several weeks after they met backstage on The X Factor.

The pair have kept their fledgling romance a secret until producers of the show caught them in a clinch last week.

A source said: "They've been seeing each other really hush-hush for a bit but producers started asking questions.

"He's completely smitten."

Only last week, Harry was linked to fellow contestant Cher Lloyd - though she has been linked to a lot of X Factor people, all seemingly false.

Will Simon Cowell want to nip this romance in the bud so he can concentrate on the band...?

To view the lesson plan click here.
To view the powerpoint click here.
To view the writing frame used click here.
To view the time line used click here. 

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

Wednesday 29th November - Hugh Dennis!

There was a huge buzz of excitement around the whole school (staff included!) about today’s visitor, Hugh Dennis.  The children came in first thing eager to meet our celebrity guest, however one thing was different today – no food!  We wanted to maintain an air of professionalism around Hugh so we didn’t really want toast crumbs about the room and we also felt that we wanted to keep distractions to a minimum. 

Together, we set up the room and went through what was going to happen.  The children rehearsed their questions with us hot seating as Hugh.  Throughout the weeks we have seen the children become much more confident in their questioning skills and this was really evident in their practice run.  J and T (two of the children) volunteered to welcome Hugh and introduce our project to him.  They were a bit nervous but really proud to be doing it. 

Helen was given the task of collecting Mr Dennis from reception, however due to the excitement (and Dyslexia) she persisted in calling him Hugh Laurie to everyone’s amusement.  Quick changes of plan were needed, and Sophia took on the challenge.  Helen and Ollie noticed a silence in the room as the children waited in anticipation of his arrival...

Hugh quietly arrived and we were all struck by how down to earth he was.  And we loved him.  He took his seat in the middle of our horseshoe and the interrogation began!  The boys were straight in there with the questions that they had prepared and they seemed to respond well to Hugh’s answers and ask questions based on this.  Hugh was really engaging and everyone in the room felt part of the discussion.  We think the fact that Hugh is a comedian and on television really helped to keep the children interested and his manner with his audience was superb!  This provided such an exemplary model to the children for their own radio production. 

Something that struck a chord with many of the children was Hugh’s answer to J’s question about what he thinks has made his career so successful.  Hugh responded by explaining that the most important thing was being yourself and not trying to imitate other people who you think are good.  He went on to say that audiences can see through this if you’re not being true to yourself. 

After an hour of discussion it was time for goodbye.  Hugh kindly signed autographs and a group picture was taken for posterity.  Having such a high profile visitor in to school provided the children with inspiration to begin to plan out their own radio broadcasts after break. 

The day was a great success; however one thing marred the day.  We tried to record the hour long interview for use in the final podcast.  Unfortunately, something went wrong and our recording was lost.  This was quite hard to deal with initially, especially breaking it to the children, but they were still really pleased with the day and dealt with it maturely. 

We’re all looking forward to next week where the hard work really starts – planning and recording our radio programmes!

To view the lesson plan click here.
To view the powerpoint for the lesson click here. 

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

Word cloud

Take a look at a word cloud I generated from our blog so far.....http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2781752/creativity

Wednesday 17th November 2010

Week 3 of our project, and still going strong!

The children were immersed in different radio genres this week: interviews, sports, news, comedy, advert and jingle.

Firstly, we listened to a Primary School radio show made by year 6 children. We asked the children to find positives and negatives to what made it an effective show. All the pupils were really engaged and it was fabulous to see how their knowledge and understanding is growing. They were able to critic audience, voice, clarity, music and jingle choices; furthermore, they were also becoming analytical of the radio genres we heard.

Secondly, we discussed our visit to Littlehampton Academy, which seemed to have been a very memorable and useful experience. All the yr9s were thinking about the ‘top tips’ which Oli had given them, which was also evident throughout the lesson.

For the main section of the lesson we asked the children to become experts on 2/3 radio genres, of which they then had to present back to the class in their pairs. All of them were very clear of their purpose, audiences and elements which each genre needed to include. One group in particular began to think about how they could make the sport accessible to girls, as well as boys, and the implications for this in their radio broadcast!

Finally, we shared the exciting news about week 4 and our secret celebrity, Hugh Dennis! All the children were very excited; many had either seen him on Mock the Week or on Outnumbered. The children came up with their own questions and there was a noticeable difference in their confidence and quality of their questions. We believe that the children have really benefited from orally rehearsing their questions, with their talk-partners, peers and us. We often do ‘hot seating’ to practise their techniques.

We think that the children are now ready to plan their radio broadcast, using a variety of good quality radio genres, and we are all looking forward to the forth coming weeks!

To view the lesson plan click here.
To view the powerpoint for this lesson click here. 
To access the radio genres clips, please click the following links:

Advert 1
Advert 2
Comedy 1
Interview 1
Interview 2
Jingles
News 1
News 2
Real radio jingles
Sport 1
Sport 2

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

Visit to The Littlehampton Academy radio station.

Today we visited The Littlehampton Academy's (Wednesday 10th November) own radio station, Revamp. This followed on nicely from the previous week's visit to Spirit FM where we got the opportunity to see what happens within a school radio station. As with the previous week we were ready with a number of questions for our host which we were able to put accross and get further ideas for our own radio podcasts. This gave us lots to think about when we returned back to school as to how we can approach our own podcasts. A massive thank you must go to our brilliant host Oli at The Littlehampton Academy who gave a great wealth of information to us. It was clear from this visit that the children were engaged and are developing confidence with creating and asking questions which is an excellent achievement.

Once back in school with our growing knowledge of podcasting we began to explore some of the software that we will be using over the coming weeks, such as Dance eJay and Podium. The children really engaged with both of these programmes and within a short period they were creating some fabulous jingles and audio recordings, with such an impressive start it will be great to see the progress that we make in the next few weeks!

Whilst we were busy experimenting with the software some of the students began to think about Diverse radio's Logo and what it could look like, something we will look at in the next lesson.

To view our lesson plan click here.
To view the powerpoint for this lesson click here.

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

9th Novemeber 2010

Today we wrote a short article about our creativity project to go into the universities magazine. This is sent to all schools and staff involved with all the different Year 3 creativity projects. We also put the link to our blog in the article and the same photograph which will be appearing the in the Bognor Observer hopefully this week! The university article is below…

Diverse FM

We are very excited and proud to be a part of The Regis school project to Raise Literacy Attainment with a group of eight Yr 9 pupils. We officially launched the project on 3^rd November with our ‘Super Start’, a trip to Spirit FM. The pupils were really engaged and were able to make their own jingle, say hello on air and were interviewed for the news bulletin. We will be working with the pupils until Christmas, including a trip to Littlehampton Academy to see how they run their school radio station and a visit from a secret celebrity. The Yr 9s have already assigned roles to each other and will begin to start planning and creating their sections, including: the news and weather, music, jingles, sport, gossip and comedy. The pupils have also come up with their own name for their radio station Diverse FM and are currently designing their logo!

For all our up to date reflections, photos and progress check out our blog at: http://raisingattainmentinliteracy.blogspot.com/ Feel free to comment, we’d love to hear your opinions!

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

Visit to Spirit FM - 3rd November 2010

Last Wednesday saw our first 'proper' lesson with the students.  We went on a visit to Spirit FM in Chichester to see how a radio station works.  While in school before the visit, we came up with questions that the children wanted to ask the people who work at Spirit FM.  They thought about what they wanted to find out and analysed their questions in great detail to make sure they were as good as could be.  This involved lots of oral rehearsal and role play, which was great fun!  The students were ready with video cameras and Dictaphones so there was no need for them to write anything down whilst at the station.

Huge thanks must go to all the staff, and especially Ian Crouch, at Spirit FM who made the visit so enjoyable and worthwhile!  Some of the things we got to do included:

- Meeting the sales and news teams.
- Looking around the studios, including sitting in with presenter Millie while she was on air!!!  We have to be very quiet!
- Recording a jingle, this took a few times to get it right! 
- Three of the students recording vox pops that were played in all the news bulletins that day, well done you guys!
- Having a question and answer session with Ian, the programme controller.

It was so useful to see what really goes into making a show and the students all thought it was really exciting!  According to JW, there was a real buzz about school the next day!

Back in the classroom we assessed what had been learnt and discussed the next session.  The students were asked to try to design a logo for our station, as today we also democratically named our station....welcome to Diverse FM!!

As teachers we thought this session was really successful, a 'Super Start' to the things we have planned.  For our next session we hope to think about working with other adults, as this is something that we felt could be improved to bring huge benefits to the intervention.

Here are some photos from the visit....

See you next week!

To access our lesson plan click here.

To access our powerpoint for this lesson click here.

27th October

Just a quick update! Today we have planned and resourced most of the first 3 lessons. It has been a long process grappling with new technology; however we think it has been worth it and that all three lessons are stimulating, fun and will engage the children with the project!

We are now just waiting to start our project, and are looking forward to Wednesday!

20th October

Today was our first meeting with the children and it was amazing! The children were really engaged, discussing lots of ideas and happy to share these with others. One child said that, “It’s a really different lesson because we’re all talking and we don’t have to be scared to talk. And the teachers are listening to what we’re saying.” Another said, “It’s really relaxed, and different to normal English lessons.”

We all felt that this was a fabulous start to our project and a good platform for us, and the children, to begin our ethos of A Community of Learners.  

This morning’s lesson went very well today because we worked as a team. We all had sections to lead, but we bounced off of one another. None of us felt that we ‘trod on anyone else’s toes’ and it all came together as a whole. We were all relaxed and enjoying it with the children, which has definitely given us all confidence to continue team teaching. We are also getting amazing support from the university staff, which is great.

Mr Men and Little Miss

This was a really successful start to the lesson. The children were all happy to have snacks/drinks and begin their reflective drawings of Mr Men or Little Miss to represent ‘How they feel about literacy?’ The girls however found this most challenging because they were worried about ‘not drawing well’. We shared our Mr Men/Little Miss drawings to help them overcome this.  Some of the comments they made when discussing their drawings were that: they were often bored in their English lessons, they didn’t like having to sit down to read and write, they also felt that they couldn’t and didn’t move about in their lessons. Here are some examples:

 We also took a few photos of the children working and SK and OH teaching from this morning’s lesson:

As part of the lesson the children came up with the kinds of things they would like on their radio station:

(Photo to follow)

We also brainstormed radio names:

(Photo to follow)

At the end of the lesson we introduced our Reflection Chart. It has a scale from 1 – 10; 1 being uncertain, terrified, apprehensive; 5 – ok; to 10 – happy confident, excited. The children had their names on stickers for the lesson, they were then asked to stick their name on the chart, where they felt the lesson had gone for them. It was lovely to see that all the children were in the green section, numbers 9 and 10! Here is the photo of the Reflection chart: 

JW also mentioned how to get the children’s ideas from their post-its onto the IWB (Interactive White Board) more effectively. We realised that not all the children’s ideas for the radio station’s name were shared, so JW said to use the webcam to take a photo of their post-its and put up on IWB. This way we can annotate and adapt their ideas, record them etc…

Click here for the PowerPoint.

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

19th October

Today I (HG) have started to feel a little anxious about teaching tomorrow. It will be the first time that I will be team teaching with my peers! However I spoke to OH and SK today about this. Both of them were really supportive and explained that we’re here to learn from one another and to expand our experiences. So I am looking forward to meeting the children tomorrow and rising to a personal challenge – peer team teaching! HG

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

Newspaper Article

Some very exciting news this morning; our project has been published in the ‘Bognor Regis Observer’!!! The issue is ‘Thursday, October 14, 2010’ on pg 6. We all thought it was going in the Chichester Observer, so I accidently discovered it this morning in the library! A very positive start to the beginning of our project!
                     

                         

We liased with our university tutors to keep them informed of our progress...

Hello,

I just thought I would keep you updated about the presentation this afternoon, as it was a real success! Loads of parents came and they were able to tell us what an impact we have had on the children, not only in literacy, but across the whole of their time in school! It was a great afternoon, and the Observer also managed to come and take a photo, so we should be in Thursday's edition!

Helen 

__________________________________________________________________

Really really glad for you - I'll watch out for it in the Observer!

C

__________________________________________________________________

Thanks for the update Helen. It's *so* exciting isn't it? Great when people say thanks. Clearly it is in large part due to your group's professionalism and motivation, so congrats to you all. I'm *so* sorry I missed it.

D

__________________________________________________________________

Wow!  Well done all of you!  I am so proud of you.  You have done really well.  I feel sure the school will also enjoy your success. Keep going folks and this is excellent.  I will forward your blog onto our Marketing people if I may with your permission.

V

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

13th October update

Back to 13th October and today we had our third Muffins and Mindmaps session.  This was really interesting and we came away with some useful ideas that we think could work well in the classroom. 

Labyrinths

DR showed us how to design our own labyrinth.  He told us that they can be useful for helping you to focus your attention at the task in hand.  Here is how you can design your own:

Little Miss and Mr Men

Our next task was to draw our own Mr Men or Little Miss person depicting how we feel about our project so far.  We all thought this was a really effective way of getting people to express their feelings and fears in a non threatening way.  Here is our character:

We are all excited and really enthusiastic about our project.  It's exactly the type of thing we wanted to do, even though it was picked for us by our tutors.  They obviously know us very well!  At the same time we know that it is a big task and we want to do well, both in terms of making this a success for the children and achieving high final grades.  We though that Miss Happy but Flappy captured this well!

Categorising group members 

We were asked to try to come up with job titles for the people in our group, depending on the skills they provide.  An example of this might The Godfather for someone who is very controlling and bossy!  Thankfully we don't have one of those amongst our ranks.  We did find it really tough to but labels on each other though.  We have different strengths but these come out at different times when needed.  DR referred to a document called MTR - i Team Roles.  A version of this can be found by clicking here.

DR also used a selection of toy animals that some teachers in West Sussex use to show the different skills that children might need when working. 

Chameleon - adaptability

Cat - curiosity

Bee - team worker

Owl - wise

Tortoise - determination

Spider - networking

Dragon - imagination

After the Muffins and Mindmaps session we planned our first meeting with the children which is taking place on Wednesday 20th October from 08.30 til 09.30.  We hope to embrace the Muffins and Mindmaps style and keep our sessions with the children relaxed.  See our plans here.

That's all for this week, we'll be back soon!  Thank you to everyone who has given us encouragement this week.  Creativity is keeping us going!

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

6th Oct to 12th Oct update

We've got lots to blog about since our last post.  On 6th October we went to our second Muffins and Mindmaps session.  The focus was requirements analysis.  We had to came away with a number of things to think about including:

- Who are the stakeholders?  e.g. the group, the children, teachers in the school, parents and governors.  These people will have different needs and ideas about what the project is.  It can be difficult to align the children's needs with those of the adults.

- Setting clear objectives for your project

- Give people models to work with and get feedback on these models (iterative prototyping).  Evaluate your plans regularly.

- Promote discussion by using the models mentioned above.  Think about using the diamond analysis.

After this we had a tutorial with VL to discuss the progress we've made.  She was really pleased with our ideas and the overview we have produced.  She came up with some suggestions about getting local media involved and trying to find some local celebrities for the children to interview.  After the tutorial we emailed some people and got in touch with the Chichester Observer.  We have a few tentative links and we're currently in the process of exploiting these for the benefit of the children.  The Observer has agreed to run a piece about the project this week.  They will follow this up by coming to the school after our visit to the local radio station to take a picture of us and the children.  We hope the children like this! 

Later on in the day we met with JW.  She kindly came into university to meet with us and discuss our plans.  This went really well and JW seemed impressed with our ideas.  we confirmed timings for each lesson and these have been booked in.  We had now made an action plan of things we need to confirm, such as visits and resources.  This was emailed to JW on 8th October. 

On 8th October we got in touch with AW, an ICT technician at the university.  We decided it might be easier to borrow some laptops ready loaded with software that is easy to use and bring these into school for the lessons.  This means we will be familiar with the software which should ensure things go smoothly.

We also had a really good chat with CS, an ICT lecturer as we had some questions about copyrighting this blog and the plans that we publish on here.  This discussion was really useful and we came away with some firm ideas about how to go about this.  CS also seemed to quite impressed with the project that we're doing.  It's really encouraging to hear this from people you respect; hopefully we are doing something right!

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010

An update of where we are

This might seem a little backward but we thought we'd post an update of the last week's activities.  On Wednesday (30th September) we met with our contact with the secondary school.  We went in with some ideas that we've posted previously.  The meeting went well but we came out knowing that we had to rethink our plans.  However we were really excited about this as our remit is much wider than we had previously thought.  Our new focus is marrying together Literacy and Technology into a 6 week intervention that really engages the children.  The school seems really supportive, especially the Headteacher, and of course our contact, JW. 

JW is coming to visit us at University on 6th October to to discuss the progress we have made since the last meeting.  We will also be meeting with VL, our Creativity tutor to keep her in the loop.

Here is a link to some golden rules for project management that we developed in our first 'Muffins and Mindmaps' meeting.  We came up with the ideas as a group and our tutor DR kindly collated them...Click here for the Golden Rules to Project Management

Overview of the Intervention

We spent today coming up with a more detailed plan of what we wish to achieve and do over the course of the 6 weeks that we have with the children.
Click here to see our plans

Making good progress in KS3

We had our first meeting with the school today, of which more to follow.  For now, here is a link to some documentation that might be useful... Making good progress in KS3

S

Everbody Writes Day - 21st October 2010

A Guide for Secondary Schools

This might something useful for the school to get involved in if they don't already.

CLPE Writing scales

Here is a link that might be useful when planning our intervention...

CLPE writing scale 2

It is discussed in the paper Putting literature at the heart of the literacy curriculum (Nicholson, 2006).  What do you think?

Handout for the meeting

Raising attainment in literacy

By looking at the information available to us, including Ofsted reports, the school’s website and the previous creativity project we have begun to come up with a picture of where the school currently stands with regard to literacy. 

Our aims

Building on the success of last year’s project, we propose a programme focusing on developing pupils as writers.  Using the critical reading skills acquired through the intervention Ready Steady Book, we hope to remove barriers within the reader writer relationship and therefore increase attainment. 

We would like to consult the pupils that we will be working with in order to incorporate their interests and ideas about what would work for them into the programme.  Some of our initial thoughts would be to:

introduce response partners

look at the talk for writing model

model and scaffold the writing process explicitly with the children

shared writing

develop success criteria through a genre approach

develop writing through immersion in text type

writing frames/ starters

displays to aid writing / working walls

ensure creative purpose and audience e.g. blog, book, or magazine.