Early, Featured, First, Fourth, Glow, Other Big Stories, Parental Involvement, Second, Senior Phase, Technologies, Third

Blogging to enagage with Parents at Dens Road Primary School

September 16, 2011 Louise Henderson 1 Comment

Post written by Lorraine Munro, Dens Rd Primary School Dundee

Blogging with our class has helped me and my colleagues engage with parents in their children’s learning and the life of the school, and given an opportunity to consulate, communicate and open a dialogue with both learners and parents. I hope that by sharing our experiences, I’ll give you some ideas for starting your own class blogs.

I work in Primary One in Dens Road Primary School in Dundee, Scotland. Our Scottish Schools Digital Network, GLOW, introduced Glow Blogs and we decided to think about blogging as a way to engage parents. These are blogs based on WordPress. I wasn’t really familiar with blogs and wasn’t sure of their purpose, but we were really enthusiastic about trying to use them to engage parents with learning.

Parents in nursery (pre-school) usually have quite a lot of contact with staff, can ask about learning and see their child’s progress when they collect them. Moving into Primary One (ages 4 and 5) is slightly different. Parents tend to have limited contact and pick up and drop off at the school gate. Children are also notorious for answering ‘nothing’ when asked what they have been doing at school!

We embarked on using a blog to show parents the learning that was taking place in school and hopefully foster good home/school links. We called it Dens Road Primary One. At the beginning, we didn’t gain permissions from parents/carers as we only used images of areas or displays in the classroom. As this is a public facing blog, we knew that if we wanted to use images of children we would have to gain permission from parents/carers.

We started by sharing what our topic was and some of the areas of learning that children would have an opportunity to use during the school day. We also uploaded images of sound work that they were introduced to by the teachers and number work we were doing in the classroom. Here is an example of the type of images we used. These images were used when we were learning about growing and plants.

The blog posts were shared with the children every week and the children were encouraged to ask their parents to comment on the blog posts.

We put up some website links that children could access at home to support learning too.

The URL for the blog was printed on the bottom of our homework diary so parents were reminded where they could access it.

The comments that were made by parents were really encouraging. Here are some examples:

Chloe’s Mum – What fantastic sock puppets! Chloe is going to show her little brother Callum how she made hers this weekend so he can have one too! Keep up the good work primary 1.. Can’t wait to see what your up to next week!

Caseys mum – hi Casey really enjoyed Idris and had lots to tell me about him it is fun and interesting to look at the blog and see what Casey has been doing.

Donna (lee’s mum) – Hi, Really enjoying seeing all of the photo’s of the school. This blog is great. Look at it all the time. Enables me to see what Lee does at school. Keep up the good work. Thanks

kayleigh´s mum – I loved the caterpillar and the pictures.Thank you teachers for all your hard work . Kayleigh is so happy and everywhere we go she explains how wonderful her school is. When is the next party?

During snow week – when the school was closed for a week – we put up websites that the children could access and gave them ideas for having fun at home in the snow.

We put reminders up on to the blog about events in school, for example, as an extra way of keeping parents informed.

We also blogged with another P1 class, as our school was celebrating its 100-year birthday. The other school, St Andrew’s Primary School in Dundee, is a very new school. The children took photos of our school and I put them on the blog. They helped me write the blog post. The other school took pictures of their school. We looked at the photos and commented on the blog posts.

We used tags to build a word cloud of the popular posts and made it easy for people visiting the site to find areas that they were interested in.

We added a ClustrMap widget to the blog and we soon saw that it was getting lots of visits from around the world. This gave us an opportunity to share a totally different learning experience with the children.

We looked at the world map and discussed different countries names and where they were. We had some parents who had relatives abroad who were visiting the blog and children were able to discuss this in the classroom. We also looked at how many people were looking at our blog every day. Nearly 3500 visitors and we are still very popular!

Blogging in Primary One has been a great way to help engage with the parents of our pupils. Some things we will look at next include promoting the use of the local library for free Internet access and having drop-in sessions at the end of the school day as a way of reaching parents who don’t have Internet access so we are truly inclusive.

CfE Curriculum Area, Dundee Active Learning, First, Literacy, Other Big Stories, Second

Critical Reading Skills – Cracking the Case!

August 30, 2011 User deactivated Leave a comment

In August 2010 I was given responsibility for a P4/5 class. In reading, it became apparent that the majority of the children were able to decode words confidently and read aloud, however they needed support to meet the Curriculum for Excellence Reading outcomes connected with ‘understanding, analysing and evaluating’ (literacy outcomes 16 – 19). I decided to adapt a Reading Detective programme outlined by Dundee City Council and to use it as the basis for a programme in class. The programme defines various reading skills and attaches a detective role to each; the children are encouraged to become these detectives whilst examining texts in class and at home. I chose eight reading skills to focus on: Summariser, Word Finder, Question Master, Passage Master, Link Maker, Illuminator, Mind Mapper and Style Seeker.

My adapted program began with the children receiving a brown manila envelope with a CD inside it sent by the ‘Department of Crimes Against Literature’, a special police department set up within Dundee to fight the eight members of the B.A.D. (Books are Dull) Gang. The children completed enrolment forms for the Trainee Officer Scheme and thereafter, on a weekly basis, received a case file about a member of the gang and an appropriate ‘training mystery’ to solve in class. The children therefore experienced a different reading skill each week since each member of the B.A.D. Gang corresponded to a specific Detective role. Once they had completed all the tasks a graduation ceremony was held and each child was presented with a Detective Kit.

The children, however, found some of the skills harder than others, particularly the skills which involved looking at how a writer uses descriptive language to convey meanings and feelings (Style Seeker and Illuminator), so the following term was spent focussing on these skills through the context of fairytales. Fairytale characters and stories were under attack from the B.A.D. Gang and they sent messages to the children. They were ‘trained’ to spot true and fake ‘mixed up’ stories. I chose to focus on 6 ‘mixed up’ fairytale books including ‘The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs’ by Jon Scieszka and ‘Goldilocks Returns’ by Lisa Campbell Ernst and the children ‘examined’ these in mixed ability groups. I also worked in collaboration with staff from the Learning Resources department and the Schools Library Service, and arranged visits to two local libraries in the area which had just been ‘attacked’ by the B.A.D. Gang.

The children have become much more confident talking about, and using, the skills required when reading and will often apply these skills in different contexts and other curricular areas. They are also extremely enthusiastic about Reading Detective tasks and so I wanted to channel this energy into tackling longer texts which require greater concentration. This term we focussed on the works of Dick King Smith: farmers have been calling the department to say that they have been finding fields filled with torn up books by the author. Instead of sending home books from the school reading scheme, all the children read a Dick King Smith novel suitable for their level of reading. He was a prolific writer and wrote for a variety of reading abilities. The children were put in to small ‘book groups’ and they chose the book they would like to read and discuss. We may also visit the Central Library in Dundee, however it is all dependent upon what the B.A.D. Gang will get up to next!

Curricular Level, Early, First, Fourth, Other Big Stories, Sciences, Second, Senior Phase, Third

Learning in the Sciences in Dundee

August 17, 2011 Louise Henderson Leave a comment

Professor Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Scottish Government, has said that science, engineering and technology are not only essential for driving our economy – now and in the future – but are also significant parts of Scotland’s heritage and culture.

Here in Dundee, eminent local scientist Sir Philip Cohen has said of our city that it is no longer famed for “jute, jam and journalism” but “biochemistry, biomedicine and biotechnology.”

Young Dundonians with an interest in science may hold the key to Dundee’s future prosperity. Such a responsibility rests with us as teachers then, to deliver science topics in an active, confident way to inspire these scientists of the future.

Our local DSC – Sensation has loads of interesting exhibits and activities all year round and there will be lots of opportunities to do extra science activities in November at Dundee’s Science Festival. Look out for more news on this!

CPD for science teaching is also in the pipeline. CPD Online will have sessions on the ASE “Be Safe!” material for primary and early years staff, and also a secondary review and exploration of free online resources. Secondary sciences and social subjects teachers will also have the chance to sign up for Carbon Capture, a one day session to be delivered by SESEF (Scottish Earth Science Education Forum) later in the session.

Scottish Government is investing in science education, and we are definitely getting something right – see this article about science subject uptake in Scotland. Make the most of the resources being provided – our pupils and our city will benefit. Check out STEM Central and Do Science sites.

Even more importantly, please share your science lesson success stories here and what you are doing for Curriculum for Excellence delivery in the sciences. See the instructions on posting at the side. We can all learn so much from each other!

All Posts, CfE Curriculum Area, Curricular Level, Dundee Active Learning, Early, Expressive Arts, Featured, First, Health and Wellbeing, Health Promoting, Literacy, Other, Other Big Stories, Technologies, Transition

Interactive White Boards in Early Years

August 2, 2011 User deactivated Leave a comment

I have recently been lucky enough to have been given a Promethean Board to use in the Active Learning Zone area I work in. The children in P1 are well used to using the board in the classrooms with the teacher but I needed them to use the board with little or no adult support. The youngsters know how to calibrate the board so I was confident they could do this with support from their fellow pupils if necessary.

I decided to allow the children to use the Active Inspire software and just let them play with it. They drew pictures, wrote their names, changed colours, pen size and drew shapes. The only support I gave was to show them how to do something if they asked, eg. How do I get a new page? How do I change the background colour? Children choose the Promethean Board as an activity and up to three can go there at once although only one can use the board at a time. The children watch patiently and give instructions and help to the person on the Promethean Board when needed.

We have moved on to drawing with a purpose. A recent health topic looked at the different parts of our faces. I had a display next to the Promethean Board to remind them of the different parts of the face and gave instructions that the activity on the Promethean Board today was ‘drawing your own face’. I also left a mirror for them to check how they looked so they could copy. The children were asked to write their name on the flipchart page before they finished. Here are some of the pictures they drew.

The children have become really confident with the Active Inspire software and really enjoy creating and sharing their creations with each other and on their P1 blog. We also print off some of their activities do keep in their individual Folio of Work which is a reflection of their time in P1 which they can share with their parents. The children have become confident individuals who can share their learning with others.

Lorraine Munro, READ Early Years Practitioner, Dens Road Primary School, Dundee.

All Posts, Early, Expressive Arts, Featured, First, Health and Wellbeing, Health Promoting, Literacy, Mathematics, Numeracy, Other Big Stories, Social Studies, Technologies, Transition

The Land of Me

August 1, 2011 Louise Henderson Leave a comment

The Land of Me, Eric, Buddy and Willow have finally arrived in Dundee for some exciting adventures with our Early Level community! I think they’ll love it here as they’ve already enjoyed so many adventures with children throughout Scotland and England. Not content with being the birthplace of marmalade and the home of the fabulous new V&A building, our Dundee school children will now be welcoming three furry and feathery newcomers to our classrooms.

Following the incredible early success of The Land of Me project run by the Consolarium with our Dundee Nursery Schools, our Primary Schools wanted to get on board and continue to promote transition and active learning.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/-txFGOzPhek" width="693" height="560" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

The Land Of Me has been fully promoting ICT, Active Learning, Creativity and Language skills with our Early Level pupils in our Curriculum for Excellence. Pupils have been engaged and motivated to progress through the exciting chapters, discover the characters and continue their adventures away from the computer with the multitude of printable resources. They have been engage in imaginative play, collaborative tasks and have had great fun and enjoyment doing so! The animation is beautiful and it’s been a real joy sharing this fantastic resource with our community of early level pupils and practitioners in Dundee. Find out how Bernadette Donald from Wallacetown Nursery has been pioneering the use of The Land of Me.

Land of Me can be found in the Start Programs menu on Dundee curriculum computers. If you have any feedback about the resource I would love to hear from you. Just leave a reply to this blog post.

CfE Curriculum Area, Curricular Level, Dundee Active Learning, Dundee Projects, Dundee School Music Theatre, Early, Eco Schools, Expressive Arts, First, Fourth, Global Citizenship, Glow, Health and Wellbeing, Health Promoting, Languages, Literacy, Mathematics, Numeracy, Other, Other Big Stories, Parental Involvement, RME, Sciences, Second, Senior Phase, Social Studies, Technologies, Third, Transition

Sharing our learning

April 27, 2011 Louise Henderson Leave a comment

This blog is managed by all education staff and pupils across Dundee. It allows teachers and pupils to share and celebrate learning. Tell everyone what is happening in your class, school or cluster. You can add a link to your Glow Group, blog or wiki to share all the exciting learning that is taking place within our nurseries, primary schools and secondary schools across Dundee.

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