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!
Wednesday 27 October 2010
Wednesday 20 October 2010
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
Tuesday 19 October 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
Wednesday 13 October 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:
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!
- 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
Monday 4 October 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
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
Click here to see our plans
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