Category: Kinneil Primary School

11th Enterprise in Education & Enterprise Champions Awards

Lynne Lauder, Enterprise Co-ordinator, oversaw the 11th Enterprise in Education Awards at Grangemouth High School on Thursday 12th June.
10 Schools attended the event to receive their certificates presented by Nigel Fletcher, Acting Director of Education.
The Awards, which started in 2006, recognise excellence in the delivery of  Enterprise in Education in schools. Awards are presented at Bronze, Silver and Gold level.  Schools who have managed to sustain Gold level for three years have the opportunity to go for Platinum.  

The schools recognised at Gold Year 2 or Year 3 at the event were, Antonine PS, Bantaskin PS, Grange PS, Kinneil PS, Deanburn PS, Larbert Village PS & St Margaret’s PS.   Four schools achieved Platinum status, Drumbowie PS, Maddiston PS, Carrongrange School, Larbert HS.  We now have 21 Platinum Enterprise schools in Falkirk.Schools also have the opportunity to nominate partners as Enterprise Champions and to date we have 461 individuals who have received recognition for their work in inspiring and motivating young people to be more enterprising.
The event was a great success as is demonstrated by these smiling faces .

Bo’ness Primary Schools work on Kinneil Museum Project

Yvonne McBlain, Curriculum Support teacher with Falkirk Council Education Services has helped to co-ordinate partnership work between Bo’ness primary schools and Falkirk Community Trust. The Trust has appointed Hanneke Scott van Wel and Lindsay Lennie to take forward their Kinneil Museum Engagement for the Future Project. On March 25th, Lindsay and Hanneke began working with primary 5, 6 and 7 pupils from each Bo’ness primary school to explore their links with their local heritage. The learning experience involved studying a range of old maps of Bo’ness and opened pupils’ eyes to the many changes which have taken place in their landscape over the last 400 years!

Observations from Kinneil PS p6/5 pupils included:

 “We’ve found out that Bo’ness was called something different long ago.”

“We can find Kinneil School in this one (map) and can’t in the other one.”

“They(person who made the map)  haven’t got the two potteries and they don’t have the gas works…we found a football ground but they didn’t have it.”

The pupils had brought in a picture or object from home and were asked to consider whether it connected to the places they had identified on the maps. One group said: “We found the town hall ‘cos that’s where the Fair takes place.”

Hanneke and Lindsay will ensure that each class taking part in the project has these learning experiences to prepare them for a whole cluster working day on 20th May in Bo’ness Town Hall. On that day each class from each school, will contribute/pool their expertise on their specialist aspect of Bo’ness history, and use this to co-create a historical timeline of their town. This process and its end product will form the pupils’ contribution to the wider community consultation taking place in order to ensure that the new museum displays reflect a true picture of the interests and experiences of the community they are designed for.

Active Approaches to Numeracy

 

Sharon Wallace, Curriculum Support Officer of the Service and School Improvement Team recently organised a professional learning opportunity entitled ‘Active Approaches to Numeracy’. 57 colleagues from Primary, Secondary and the Curriculum Support team (including QIO) spent the day examining a range of active strategies to improve attainment in mental mathematics.

 Helen MacKinven, from Big Maths provided an overview of strategies including: jigsaw numbers, CLIC and partitioning. Colleagues were also treated to the experience of a ‘Beat That’ mental maths quiz.

Clusters then worked together to look at ways forward to improve attainment in mental maths. Feedback from this day has been extremely positive.

A number of colleagues have put their names forward to be part of the Numeracy Mobilisation Team. This work will inform the update of Falkirk Council’s numeracy strategy. The first meeting for this group is being held on 12th February. For further information on this, please contact Sharon Wallace at sharon.wallace@falkirk.gov.uk

Scottish Learning Festival 2013 – Sharing Good Practice

Sharon Wallace, Curriculum Support Officer, Curriculum Support Team delivered a workshop to 95 colleagues from across Scotland and beyond at this year’s Scottish Learning Festival.

The theme of the presentation was ‘Sharing the Learning with Parents/ Carers – Active Methodologies’ and the aim of the session was to provide an overview of the wide variety of approaches Falkirk establishments are using to share active methodologies with parents and carers.

The agenda for the workshop was:

  • An overview of the Falkirk picture
  • An explanation of the range of active methodologies used in Falkirk
  • Parent/ carer workshops on offer
  • Literature/ leaflets used
  • Online methods – blogs/ you tube/ twitter
  • Working in partnership with schools/ partners
  • How this fits into Falkirk’s Literacy Strategy 2013 – 2016

Three pupils from Kinneil Primary School spoke eloquently and confidently about their experiences helping out at active learning workshops for parents. They talked about how attending the parental workshop gave their own parents ideas on how to support their homework.

Sharon shared a short video of Susan Dyer from Bankier Primary School explaining the impact an active learning workshop had on her school, as well as a video from a Bankier parent describing what it meant to her and her family.

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https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/fa/LiteracyStrategy/

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[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/97EOc9Tks_Q" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/iiFjsaCTy08" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

Feedback included:

"Inspirational, you have really motivated me!"

"Thank you for sharing the Active Literacy parental leaflets - they are very useful."

Lots of delegates who attended this seminar then came along to Falkirk Council's stand in the Local Authority Village to enquire about our short animations Falkirk has developed on CfE and Active Literacy.

Active Literacy – P6/7 Training

Sharon Wallace, Curriculum Support Officer of the Curriculum Support Team has carried out Active Literacy training over the past two weeks with 54 teachers. The two three hour sessions examined the writing programme incorporating spelling and the reading programme.

Session one looked at how teachers can support pupils in becoming independent spellers. Pupils are taught strategies to use their previously learned knowledge of phonemes and spelling rules to more complex, polysyllabic words.

 The course examined the programme for spelling strategy work, alongside the new addition of ‘vocabulary building’, homophones and common confusions. Trials of the programme so far indicate that pupils are really enjoying the investigation element of prefixes and suffixes and how these affect the meaning of words.

The session also examined the writing genres covered at second level looking at incorporating writing trios, chunking, use of genre success criteria and next steps.

Session two focused on the development of the six key comprehension strategies across a range of texts. These strategies are:
1. Prior knowledge and prediction
2. Metalinguistics
3. Visualisation
4. Inference
5. Main ideas
6. Summarising and paraphrasing.

Sharon demonstrated how to develop these skills using a traditional ‘novel’ text, moving image (film trailer) and a poem. The course also looked at using online tools such as Powtoon, go animate and twixster to develop reading skills.

Colleagues were given a ‘Stories Allways’ resource containing a range of Scottish myths and legends as well as two CDs. This is a great resource as it provides pupils with a range of challenging questions, tasks and a synopsis of each tale.

Colleagues enthusiastically participated in a range of Active Literacy activities across the course of the two sessions and feedback so far has been really positive.

“The course was delivered extremely well by Sharon Wallace and the resources provided were very useful.”

“The course was presented over 2 days in which it provided an overview of the key methodologies and strategies as outlined in North Lanarkshire’s Active Literacy 6/7 programme. I thought all aspects of the course were useful and it enhanced my knowledge and understanding of the 6/7 programme which I will now be able to confidently implement in the classroom.”

“I am new to teaching as well as the Active Literacy programme. I had very little knowledge and understanding prior to the course however I now feel I can confidently implement active literacy in the classroom.”

“Sharon is a very enthusiastic presenter and it is clear that she wholly believes in the Active Literacy Programme. Her passionate delivery and ideas instil in you, the confidence to have a go in your own classroom.”

Active Literacy Workshop for Parents and Carers

Sharon Wallace, Curriculum Support Officer of the Curriculum Support Team has developed some helpful materials to support Falkirk establishments in sharing the learning at home. This active literacy workshop provides parents, carers and extended families with an overview of the active literacy strategies and methodologies from P1 to P7. It looks at the areas of spelling and phonics, reading and writing and how children can be supported with these at home.

Parents and carers are also invited to be ‘reciprocally taught’ by their children in a series of different workshop activities which include:

  • phoneme stories
  • Elkonin boxes
  • rainbow writing
  • spell-er-cise
  • diacritical marking
  • fun spelling tasks

So far this session, the following schools have already hosted workshops:

  • Maddiston Primary
  • Shieldhill Primary
  • Kinneil Primary

 

These workshops are accompanied by parental leaflets aimed at P1-3, P4-5 and P6-7 parents.

For more information, please contact Sharon Wallace.

Staff booking onto CPD

Jamielee Dickson, Clerical Assistant within the Falkirk Council Education Services Curriculum Support Team deals with staff booking onto courses. Jamielee is the person at the end of the phone or sending e-mails for staff booking onto professional development.

Kinneil Primary School whole-school blog

Malcolm Wilson, ICT Curriculum Development Officer in the Curriculum Support Team of Falkirk Council Education Services, supported staff at Kinneil Primary School in setting up a whole-school blog to share the learning journey of pupils.

This was set up at the request of staff at the school so that individual classes can contribute to one blog in one place, rather than separate class blogs, so they can post about what’s happening in their class and by tagging and choosing from their class on a list of categories, the posts can easily be seen by the school, parents and wider community.

Although all staff in the school are set up as full administrators of the blog, Kinneil Primary School also has a team of pupils called the K.P.S Blogging Team who are publishing blogposts describing the work going on in classes. They upload photographs, videos, slideshows and write the stories. And other pupils are also commenting on the posts, showing they are engaged in the blog.

Links are provided to the school website and the school’s page on the Falkirk Council website. Safety features are set up on the blog. Well done staff and pupils at Kinneil Primary School for sharing their learning journeys – click here to visit the whole-school blog for Kinneil Primary School.