All Posts, Literacy

Literacy across Learning at Menzieshill High

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Menzieshill High School has been running a new course for S1 this year. This Literacy across Learning course, run jointly by Mrs Brining of the English department and Miss Scott the librarian, focuses on the crucial literacy skills required throughout the school. We are working with departments across the curriculum to develop the skills pupils need and we are having a lot of fun along the way.
This video shows us demonstrating good listening skills: Listening skills

Please visit our Literacy across Learning blog to find out more about what we have been doing.

All Posts, Featured, Other Big Stories

Latest news from the McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum

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Pupils from Menzieshill High meet Lorraine at McManus

Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton

 Our first partnership exhibition with the V&A opened on 30 September. It is an exhibition about the Queen and the Royal Family by famous photographer Cecil Beaton and is the first of a series of exhibitions leading to the opening of the brand new V&A at Dundee.

Our linked Creative Learning Programmes have captured the imagination of School pupils across the city…

  • A group of S4’s from St Johns, and S2’s from Braeview (through the 4xAAAA’s project) have created a series of portrait masterpieces inspired by iconic images
  • a group of S5 and S6’s from across the city are participating in a youth arts portrait project on Thursday evenings working with 2 professional artists
  • Cultural Champions from city Primary Schools came along to the exhibition preview for a VIP glimpse of the exhibition
  • and a group of S3’s from Menzieshill High were lucky enough to meet Lorraine Kelly who officially opened the exhibition!

To find out more or to arrange visits to the exhibition please get in touch at the details below.

 

Screenprinted self portraits - Youth Arts Project

 Regular Creative Learning programmes

 The McManus offers a range of opportunities to Early Years, Primary and Secondary School groups. We are happy to discuss the interests of particular groups and encourage Teachers and Support staff to contact us in advance of visit. We advise Schools to book as far in advance as possible to ensure the preferred slot is available.

Linking with the Curriculum for Excellence, our current menu our menu of tours, hands on sessions, creative workshops and downloadable resources can be found in the Creative Learning section at 

www.themcmanus-dundee.gov.uk

Look out for CPD opportunities – we hope to consult with Teachers soon about making the best use of our Collections Unit in Barrack Street to utilise the thousands of objects not on display and get behind the scenes to see the work done by curators and conservators…

Contact:

Keri McGowan

01382 307216

creativelearning@dundeecity.gov.uk

Glow, Languages, Senior Phase

Using Glow Learn to support listening skills in Modern Languages

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I’m Lesley Young and I’m a teacher in the Modern Languages department in Grove Academy.  As the final stage of the Chartered Teacher programme, I had to carry out an action research project.  I chose to research listening acquisition and listening skills and focused on Higher French.  A large part of the research project related to metacognitive strategy instruction, but I also created materials to help pupils with sound discrimination. 

Learners at the beginning and intermediate stages of French sometimes find it difficult to recognise words they know when they hear them.  They have not learned the correct pronunciation, or they have poor knowledge of the rules of liaison.  I developed a booklet and sound files on pronunciation and liaison and created a Glow learn course.  Pupils were taken to an ICT suite and introduced to the course, and the listening activities were then issued as homework for the holidays on Glow learn.  From August onwards, almost every listening activity done in class was uploaded onto Glow learn.  I painstakingly copied cassettes onto CDs to rip the tracks into MP3 files.  We are lucky that the activities we do in class mostly have been written and recorded by our language assistants (unfortunately no longer employed in school), so are not subject to copyright restrictions.  The MP3 files were issued as homework and pupils were asked to listen again, along with the transcript which I also issued.  If they had had difficulty identifying the sounds that they heard in class, they were asked to read the transcript, anticipate what the words will sound like, and then listen to the MP3 file whilst reading the transcript.  Finally, they were advised to listen again, without the transcript, trying to visualise the words.  (This advice is taken from a recent research study into the listening skills of AS level students in England.) 

There are two main advantages of Glow learn for sharing sound files with pupils:  1) there is unlimited storage space 2) although it’s time consuming to upload files, it’s easier than asking each pupil to bring in a blank CD and copying the tracks onto CDs.  The disadvantage of Glow learn (compared to Scholar) is that although you are able to check that the pupils have accessed the task, you cannot actually tell if they have opened the file, and cannot tell how long they have spent on the activity.  On the other hand, they are able to copy the files onto their own ipods.  Pupils tell me that they have been doing this and seem appreciative. 

 All this listening should of course lead to an improvement in their speaking and pronunciation as well as their listening.  As most pupils seem to feel compelled to listen constantly to their ipods, I feel that we should be exploiting this and providing them with educational listening whenever possible.

All Posts, Dundee Active Learning, Expressive Arts, Featured, Health and Wellbeing, Health Promoting, Other Big Stories, Parental Involvement, Second, Technologies, Transition

A year in the life of Barnhill P7

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 Our P7 pupils at Barnhill were involved in keeping a pictorial and video diary of the year. We then created a movie file and used free music from glow to play over the top of our images and videos. Have a look at the video below which is streamed through our glow wiki page. The children loved making this and enjoyed the ICT aspect  but also learned much about working co-operatively.

https://wikis.glowscotland.org.uk/@api/deki/files/30368/=Barnhill_P7_end_of_year_film.wmv

All Posts, Featured, Languages, Literacy, Other Big Stories, Second, Third

‘Find your inner zombie’

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I was excited to enter my newly qualified teaching year on the advent of Curriculum for Excellence in 2010, and was looking forward to delivering creative lessons throughout the curriculum.

Teaching English, I found I had endless opportunity to not only create new lessons but modify existing lesson plans. The Secondary English curriculum requires pupils to experience a wide variety of writing genres, which cover the main writing outcomes. Towards the end of the year, my S1 pupils were required to write a transactional piece. The purpose of this writing task is to convey information, and topics such as ‘how to care for a pet’ are used.

Throughout the year, I attended a few TeachMeets and listened to various speakers discuss how to motivate. In one visit, we had a speaker from the Scottish Book Trust who told us to ‘find our inner zombie,’ as the children really engaged with this current topic. Although I had discussed Zombies with my pupils when we discussed childrens’ books, or T.V. programmes, I had never integrated them into my curriculum before this writing task.

The whole school cross-curricular week was approaching, and this time the topic was Rapid Response. I chose to engage with this theme by discussing disasters with the intention of creating a transactional piece of writing.

We started off by researching past disasters, hitting reading outcomes throughout this process. The pupils engaged with the texts they were using and gathered information, summarised, organised, took notes, prioritised and created new texts (Eng 3.12a, Lit 3.14a, Lit 3.15a, Lit 3.16a, Eng 3.17a) from these pieces. We then compared environmental disasters with chemical, nuclear and man-made disasters. Using real-life examples from newspapers, the pupils then used the computers to find a story of a person who had survived these disasters.

By investigating real life stories, the pupils were able to engage with the effects of these disasters, and explore the causes of these incidents. By using these stories as stimulus and exploring other people’s rights we also hit Health and Wellbeing Outcomes. The pupils found the causes of some man-made disasters thought provoking, and we were able to have moral discussions about this.

The outcome task I set the pupils was related to the Zombie phenomenon. We moved on from disasters to discuss apocalyptic versions of disasters, focusing on The Bee Movie and more science fiction type scenarios. We discussed a zombie apocalypse at great length and the information the pupils could bring to the discussion was immense! During this discussion, we examined old ‘Protect and Survive’ adverts from previous decades, which the children found very intriguing. They discussed the various media that can be used to convey information. At this point, we delved into various types of transactional writing, which ensured the pupils could be successful in this task.

The pupils created a Microsoft Publisher brochure entitled “How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse.”

For higher ability pupils, their brochure contained a lot of writing, whereas the lower ability pupils concentrated on features of informative writing, such as bullet points, sequential instructions, and simple facts. Pupils then used ScribbleMaps to scribble on a map of Dundee and alert the public to the safe zones, water supplies, infected areas, and shelter zones. The pupils loved designing routes through their own town and engaging with local landmarks and shopping centres in order to create their map. Creating this map also served as an opportunity for assessment of understanding, literacy and cooperative working.

Each pupil gained a lot from this unit and were all engaged while creating, and then presenting their brochure. Some pupils extended this further and showed examples of what tools were needed to survive, while some focused on the basics of the task. I think making this extremely relevant tapped into some of the more disengaged pupils, and was therefore an appealing task from the start. The work speaks for itself, and I am currently using the same template for an S3 class. Watch this space…

Expressive Arts, Featured, First, Glow, Languages, Literacy, Mathematics, Numeracy, Other Big Stories, Second, Social Studies, Technologies

Creating a newspaper and motivating challenging pupils

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During Term One, my Primary 7 class decided they would like to create a Class Newspaper. Within my class, as within most classes, I have pupils with challenging behaviour. I wanted all pupils in my class to be fully motivated throughout this learning context. I also wanted my pupils to have ownership of their class newspaper.

This is the interactive wall created to allow the pupils to share their planning.

The pupils were eager to get started writing their articles. However, as a class we decided that it would be a good idea to establish a ‘planning wall’ first. One of my pupils asked if we could set up a Glow Group to compliment the planning wall in our classroom. My pupils were eager to add to their planning wall even when not at school. I set up an interactive planning wall using wallwisher.com. This allowed the children to add their ideas to a wall that they all could access at any time through a link placed within their Glow group. I initially asked the question, “Which features should we include in our newspaper?” This wall allowed the children to share their ideas, comment and add to them. It gave them an opportunity to give constructive feedback on each others suggestions. All comments made by the children needed to be approved by myself before they went live.

This is a screenshot of the poll we created as a class to decide the name of our newspaper.

My class decided they wanted to give our newspaper a name. We discussed suggestions and they decided they would each vote on their favourite. I asked the class if they had ever voted online or by text using their mobile phone? I heard a unanimous chorus of “Yes!” I wanted to encourage all pupils to vote for their favourite newspaper name. I decided create an online poll using polleverywhere.com. Poll Everywhere is a free service that allows the children to vote within a teacher generated poll using their mobile phones and voting by text or by completing a simple web response form. I first saw this learning tool in action during an input given by a very innovative lecturer, Sharon Tonner, at the University of Dundee. All the children appeared to be very enthusiastic about being able to vote – including the less motivated pupils who I was targeting this learning tool towards. I felt that if I had all my pupils fully engaged from the offset of the project, the finished product would be more rewarding for them. Overnight, I had a 100% response to the poll – all of the members of my class taking part in the project!

As the project progressed and publication date was nearing, the pupils used Comic Life and Textease to create draft copies of their feature stories. The boys in particular were very keen to write up their reports of the latest school team football match. Pupils who would struggle to stay on task during a writing lesson were fully engaged with Comic Life.

There is one pupil in particular who exhibits challenging behaviour within the class. She has excellent ICT skills. I decided to give her the chance to be the ICT Consultant in Chief. She excelled in this consultative role. She was focussed and willing to show to the rest of the class how to modify and produce their paper. She clearly explained how to create a drawing in Textease, save it and then import it into Comic Life.

As well as producing a physical copy of the OL Record (Our Lady’s Record), the pupils were very keen to release an electronic copy of the paper. We used youblisher.com to create an electronic version of our paper. We created pdf’s of each page and used the online program to create our paper.

The pupils were proud of their creation. They took great delight in handing them out to family and friends at their MacMillan Coffee Morning.

Matthew Monaghan, Primary 7 class teacher at Our Lady’s Primary, Dundee.

Featured, Global Citizenship, Glow, Languages, Other Big Stories, Second, Social Studies, Technologies

A Northern Irish Partnership

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Click on this link to our video presentation.

My name is Matthew Monaghan and I am the Primary 7 class teacher at Our Lady’s Primary School in Dundee.

During my final year of the BEd at the University of Dundee I had the opportunity to take an elective in Global Learning. During one of the module inputs given by both Peter Wakefield and Brenda Keatch, it was stated, “citizenship starts at a local level. It starts with you and your class“. This struck a chord with me. I have strong links with St Anne’s Primary School in Derry, Northern Ireland. I attended this school as a child and I also had the chance to work with one of the Primary 6 classes during the final months of the last school year.

Teaching a Primary 7 class gave me the perfect opportunity to develop a partnership with the Primary 7s at St Anne’s. The aim of this partnership is to allow the children in both classes to share their learning experiences throughout their final year of primary school.  With the help of Siobhan Gillen, one of the Primary 7 teachers at St Anne’s, each pupil at Our Lady’s has been linked with two ‘Learning Partners’ from St Anne’s (due to class numbers). The project is in its initial stages. I plan to add to this post to update on its progress.

Bird's eye view of Our Lady's using Bing Maps

I introduced the partnership to a very eager class by using Google Street View and the Bird’s Eye option that is part of Bing Maps to explore both schools and both cities from above. We explored the locations in each country.

I feel an important aspect of this partnership is that it is pupil led. I try to act as a facilitator as much as possible. My class asked if we could set up a Glow group for our project. They asked if it would be possible for the pupils and teacher from St. Anne’s to be members of our Glow group.

A Voki of myself created by one of my pupils

After a lot of discussion about what the pupils wanted to find out about Ireland, the pupils decided that it would be a good idea to tell the pupils from St. Anne’s a little bit about themselves. A pupil from my class suggested writing letters and posting them. We did this intially. However, within my class there is a wide range of ability. I felt that to engage less able writers, a different tool was needed. I introduced my class to a Voki. After a quick demonstration on how to create a voki and how to obtain the code needed to embed each completed Voki in our Glow group, my class decided that they all wanted to create their own. They were very engaged. My class were keen for their Irish learning partners to view the voki created.

I felt if pupils had the chance to see each other in real time the learning experience would be enriched greatly. With support from Louise Henderson, we have begun to use the Adobe Connect component within our Glow group to video conference and share our learning experiences visually. Adobe Connect allows all pupils to take part in video based discussions using web cameras and headsets in both classrooms. So far both classes have participated in an introductory ‘Learning Conference’. We used the ‘discussion’ layout. The focus of this initial conference was to give the pupils a chance to get to know their learning partners a little better. As the project progresses the plan is for a video conference to take place every three weeks. Pupils from St Anne’s have been studying the Victorians. Pupils from my class will be focussing on the novel Matilda by Roald Dahl as a learning context.

Sharing a whiteboard in real time with both classes within Abobe Connect

During each conference pupils from both schools will share their learning journey through Primary 7 and follow an agreed agenda. We plan to use the different functions present within Adobe Connect including the sharing tab. This gives both classes the ability to use the ‘whiteboard’ pod. We will be able to create and share flipchart slides, text and free-hand drawings in real time allowing a variety of lessons to be viewed simultaneously in both Dundee and Derry. My pupils are very excited about this.

As well as using Glow as a virtual learning environment, we have also begun to use LearningNI, the VLE used by schools throughout Northern Ireland. Pupils have access to a course created within LearningNI. This gives both pupils and staff involved a chance to use two different platforms. Both ‘learning spaces’ allow pupils to share their progress. Initially, I felt it would be better to focus on one VLE. However, each has its own unique features and benefits. Pupils are able to contribute to discussion forums set up within their course in LearningNI and within their Glow group. They can view each others Voki. Pupils from St Anne’s have begun to upload PowerPoint presentations they have created based on the Victorians to our course within LearningNI. Pupils from Our Lady’s can peer assess their work, posting their comments to the workspace within LearningNI. We have also begun to do this within our Glow group.

One of the comments submitted by a pupil from St Anne's which was selected and published by the Newsdesk team within LearningNI.

Within LearningNI pupils can view current new stories within the Newsdesk section. These are edited by a member of The Guardian team. They also have the chance to submit comments which can be viewed and shared across Northern Ireland as part of the ‘Have Your Say’ section. During the October holidays I visited the Primary 7 class at St Anne’s to talk about our partnership. Four of the pupils from St Anne’s had their comments selected by the team from the Guardian and they were displayed online by the Newsdesk.

This is the header created using wix.com for our Glow Group

My pupils asked me if it was possible to make the design of our Glow group more eye-catching. We used wix.com to create web parts which we could fully edit and customise after creating a free account. We created headers for each area of our Glow group which we have been able to animate and add music to. We have added these to our glow group using the XML code generated.

This is a very exciting project in which the pupils from both schools are fully engaged. They are naturally curious about each others experiences during their final year of primary school. They are counting down the days to our next video discussion!

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All Posts, Dundee Active Learning, Early, Featured, First, Health and Wellbeing, Health Promoting, Literacy, Numeracy, Other Big Stories, Technologies

Gaming as a Context for Early Years Learning

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Post written by Lorraine Munro

I’m an Early Years Practitioner in a Primary One (ages 4 and 5) class in Dundee, Scotland. I am also a Promethean Advocate. As a previous ICT Staff Tutor, I was interested in using gaming as a hook to engage young children with all aspects of learning. We often loaned out gaming resources to schools and early years establishments as part of an initiative to support learning in the classroom through Curriculum for Excellence, Scotland’s curriculum for 3–18 year olds. The Learning Teaching Scotland website has a dedicated area to game based learning.

When I returned to school after the summer break, I was really excited to put my experiences into practice. In the last school year, we have used a variety of consoles and games to support our youngsters in their learning. This is our journey through the year…

Writing Using the Nintento DS

We began by using two Nintento DS’ at the writing table. I introduced Pictochat to the children and they practised writing sounds and letters they had been taught by the teacher. They also liked to practise writing their name and it was a great way to encourage emergent writing. They enjoyed ‘sending’ their writing to each other and this activity was a real winner with the boys. They had no problem with the small stylus and, in fact, this really helped with pencil control.

We have approximately ten Nintendo DS’ and are using them across the school. It has been embraced and other classes have used them in different areas:

  • Support for Learning has used them to support spelling
  • Classes further up the school have used them with the Brain Training game
  • An upper school class is about to embark on using them with Professor Leyton to support literacy and problem solving

Learning with Games Consoles

In Primary One, we then moved on to using the Playstation 2 with the Eye Toy. We used the game Play. I would give the children clear instructions on what game was to be played and the children would very quickly pick up the on-screen instructions. The area surrounding the game was set up to support number recognition and I would encourage the children to find their score on the number square. We also looked at Health and Wellbeing outcomes like sharing space, being aware of rules and turn taking.

We were lucky to buy gaming equipment for the school and purchased a Wii and Xbox with Kinect. Primary One children were allowed to try out the Wii and as we were doing a Health topic, we decided on FIT, which is a Dora and Diego game. Although this game is for one player, we had up to four children taking part at any time. One person held the Wii remote but all four children did the activities. Children won medals when they completed a routine so we decided to take this opportunity to support maths and every time the children won a medal they added it to our graph.

We also used the Wii game Just Dance as a whole class activity during our health week. We had four Wii remotes and everyone had a turn to hold the Wii remote and gain a score. This game was a huge success and is now one of our whole school Friday activities.

The next game we used was Yogi Bear. The children were engrossed in a Goldilocks and the Three Bears topic and I was looking at bears in my area. This game was less active, but we adapted the area to look more like Jellystone Park and although this was also a one player game we had two children participating at any time. This meant there was also a peer there to encourage and support when necessary. We moved the writing table beside the Wii area and this encouraged the boys to write and draw about their experiences with the game. Near the end of the topic, we had a Yogi Bear book. The children recorded their experiences of using the game in the book by drawing a picture and writing. Some asked me to scribe for them while others felt confident enough to have a go themselves.

Managing the Logistics

We encountered a few difficulties using the Wii as it was a very popular activity and was very much in demand. This meant that not all the children were getting an opportunity to use the game, as some were always there fast and some would stay on for a while. We devised a simple laminated sheet of all the children’s names and a whiteboard pen. I scored off the name when a child picked the Wii and they weren’t allowed to go back on until everyone had a turn. Once all the names were scored off, we cleaned the name board and we could start again. We also had a ten-minute timer so the children were responsible for setting this when they began the game. We also discussed rules for the game with the children and displayed them. We reminded children of these rules regularly and these complimented our Health and Wellbeing lesson plan within our curriculum

 

As a school we had also purchased X Box Kinect with Kinectimals. As we had an Animals topic near the end of the school year, we thought this would engage our youngsters and give opportunities for lots of discussion about animals. It did, but also supported all areas of the curriculum. We had to look at a number of different elements to make this work for us.

The area needed to be big enough so the child using the Kinect could be found by the sensor, but we didn’t want children to be using this in isolation from others. This meant we also had to fit in some kind of seating for other children to watch, discuss and support their peer through the game without them also being picked up by the sensor.

At first, using our previous gaming organisation ideas, we all had a turn at interacting with and getting to know the different cubs. We then voted using ActivExpressions about which one would be the P1 cub. We then chose the cub, which was the Black Panther cub and then proceeded into the game. The children taught the cub tricks and played games with it. They supported each other in performing the activities and carrying out the tricks. Lots of different curricular areas were supported, from maths when one child read his score of 295 and others read instructions on the screen hitting literacy outcomes. Experience was gained in Health and Wellbeing outcomes when children showed how they led and supported the learning of others and showed genuine care and understanding in caring for the cub. Overall, this game had a huge learning potential. It is not as easy to use an early years setting as the Wii, but it was well worth the effort.

Working with Pre-School Children

Our latest piece of work with the Wii has come from our transition with our nursery children (up to age 4) moving into Primary One. The nursery children had used the Mii Channel on the Wii console to create Miis for all the children as part of a topic about themselves. This allowed each child to create a Mii with their hair colour, eye colour, face shape and even find the letters in their name. When the children moved into P1, the Wii console came with them. The children have been using the Wii Sports game and bowling. This has given me an opportunity to create Miis for all the children who came to our school not from our nursery. It has also meant that the children can find their Mii when playing the bowling game. Furthermore, this game allows me to observe children who can read numbers to ten and begin early addition.

Our experiences with gaming are still developing and we are always looking for ways to engage our young people. Our latest purchase has been an iPad and we look forward to how we can support our children through their learning in new and innovative ways.

Expressive Arts, First, Literacy, Sciences, Social Studies

Wild Earth African Safari – primary 3

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As a NQT I wanted to really engage the children during their first term and so I decided to try out games based learning.  Having studied this aspect of learning in University and taking the time to refresh my knowledge I decided to use the wii along with the game “Wild Earth African Safari”.

To introduce the context and set the scene the children learnt about the location of Tanzania and some simple facts about the country.  I then shared with them that we were going to fly to Tanzania and so they had to complete a boarding pass.  Having them close their eyes while I switched on the game really helped them get into role.  They were all excited and engaged when they saw the wii and game.

The game itself encouraged collaborative work as the whole class had to work together in order to complete each assignment.  The children really enjoyed putting on the safari and animal outfits and thought it was necessary to wear these when playing the game.  I found that using this approach motivated the children to succeed in a variety of areas of curriculum.

Curriculum Links

Literacy

  • journal entries
  • postcard home from safari
  • imaginative writing – what happened next etc
  • animal fact files

Science

  • animal survival and habitat
  • camouflage

Art

  • safari animal masks
  • 3D elephants
  • camouflage painting
  • animal colouring

Drama

  • safari area in classroom led to a lot of role play
  • role play of safari animals through a story approach

Social Studies

  • location of Africa and Tanzania
  • Tanzania Flag
  • Impact humans have on environment and animals

Technologies

  • create own animal through switcheroozoo.com
  • variety of safari games

I have really enjoyed using this approach and would definitely recommend this game.  Feel free to contact me for more information.

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