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.