Scottish Education STEM Award 2015

The Scottish Education Awards celebrate the hard work and success which takes place in Scottish education. They recognise the achievements of people who dedicate their lives to children and young people and showcase the valuable work and innovation in Scottish classrooms.

This year a new award category for STEM, Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics, has been introduced. 

This category recognises establishments who are helping children and young people develop STEM skills and apply these across the four contexts for learning – curriculum, inter-disciplinary learning, ethos and life of the school and opportunities for personal achievement.

Nominations should be able to evidence the following questions and describe the impact on learners, the school and wider community:

  •  In what ways do learners in your establishment demonstrate successful application of STEM skills?
  • In what ways are learners using STEM to develop skills for learning, life and work? 
  • In what ways do you work with partners/parents/wider community to support STEM?

 Nominations for this year’s awards are now open.

Nominations close 12pm on Monday 16 February 2015.

#primaryscience

BBC Schools Report Practice Day

There is still plenty of time to sign up for the BBC’s School Report. The next practice day is on the 11th December.

www.bbc.co.uk/schoolreport/

BBC News School Report gives 11-16 year-old students in the UK the chance to make their own news reports for a real audience.

It is a collaborative project run by BBC News and BBC Learning.

Using lesson plans and materials from this website, and with support from BBC staff and partners, teachers help students develop their journalistic skills to become School Reporters.

In March, schools take part in an annual News Day, simultaneously creating video, audio and text-based news reports, and publishing them on a school website, to which the BBC aims to link.

School Reporters produced a stunning array of content on 27 March 2014, with more than 1,000 schools across the UK making the news on the biggest ever School Report News Day.

The ninth News Day will be held on 19 March 2015.

Sign up to the Social Studies e-bulletin: bit.do/e-bulletin


Scottish Youth Parliament Candidates

The Scottish Youth Parliament holds elections every two years. bit.ly/SYPelections

The next elections to the Scottish Youth Parliament will take place in March 2015. The organisation seeks to promote the values of democracy, inclusion, political independence and passion. Since its inception over 1000 young people have become MSYPs.

The deadline has now passed for registering to stand as a candidate. The confirmed candidates for the 2015 SYP Elections will be announced shortly and candidates will be announcing their manifestos.

You can already follow the candidates and ask them questions on Twitter. Use this link bit.ly/sypelex This is a chance to get involved in discussions and use #SYPElex to share who you think should be elected as an MSYP.

Amnesty Youth Awards

The Amnesty Youth Awards bit.ly/132PPRy celebrates young people’s talents for human rights reporting, photography, songwriting (and performing), campaigning and fundraising.

Applications for our Youth Awards 2015 open on 8 September 2014 and closes on the 30 January 2015.

The competition is open to young people between the ages of 7 – 19 (up to and including Further Education). Students can take part in one or more categories to develop new skills and confidence to engage creatively with human rights.

Amnesty has awards and teaching resources to support five different catagories:

The Awards run in conjunction with the Times Educational Supplement and this year’s judges include:

  • Sir Richard Branson – ambassador of Amnesty’s Youth Awards
  • Sir Trevor McDonald OBE – judge, Young Reporter strand
  • Krishnan Guru-Murthy – judge, Young Reporter strand
  • Rankin – judge, Photographer strand
  • Kate Nash – judge, Singer-Songwriter strand
  • Owen Jones – judge, Campaigner strand

Scots…an important national treasure

By Dr Simon Hall, a Scots Language Coordinator at Education Scotland.

I sometime use the phrase ‘national treasure’ when I’m out and about talking to people about Scots language. There are a few reasons why I like this phrase. Firstly, Scots is indeed a ‘national’ language. It is spoken in all its rich varieties from Stranraer to Shetland, and pretty much everywhere in between. Folk in the Borders use it, and it’s used in our Scottish cities and across the Central Belt. It thrives in Angus, Aberdeenshire, Moray, Caithness and Orkney.

Scots is the ancient language of Lowland Scotland and the Northern Isles, once used in parliament, formerly spoken by kings, poets, courtiers and commoners.  Along with English and Gaelic, it is one of the three indigenous languages of modern Scotland, and you’ll hear it today on our streets, and in our offices, factories, construction sites, shops, schools and hospitals.

Of course, Scots has a vast and rich vocabulary. Some of the academic Scots dictionaries have as many as 60,000 entries. Many of the most colourful, stand-out words are what linguists call ‘lexical items’, nouns or verbs like clanjamfry, glaur, bogle, bubblyjock, threip, gilravage, dordie-lochran, mirk or moose. But there is also a range of more common verbs and everyday prepositions – mak, tak, ken, doon, owre, ahint, afore – which are also unique to our part of the world.

Scots is so much more than just our favourite Scots word; it is the sum of the parts of the lexical items, the prepositions, and the accent. In common with Norwegian and other related Scandinavian languages, Scots uses the older ‘oo’ vowel sound in words like hoose, moose or ku where English adopted ‘ou’ or ‘ow’.

Is this stuff really treasure, though? I would have to say I think it is. Scots is a unique cultural phenomenon. Along with things like traditional dance or Scottish song, it belongs in the category of ‘intangible cultural heritage’, and, as such, it is fragile, and in some danger of being forgotten in our multi-media global village. If Scots were a wild plant or a wild creature, we would be doing everything we could to preserve it. Towns and communities using guid Scots would be designated as Sites of Special Linguistic Interest.

Scots is becoming increasingly present in social media. Shetlanders use it on Facebook every day. It is popular in text. Scots Language Dictionaries has just launched a superb new Scots dictionary app. BBC Radio Orkney broadcasts in excellent Scots every morning. Translation of classic bairns’ books into Scots is at an all-time high level.

So it’s with these and other positives in mind that the team of Scots Language coordinators at Education Scotland are working to celebrate and promote excellent Scots Language education in our schools.

Many primary schools across a range of Local Authorities are looking at developing their ability to teach Scots within the areas of Literacy and English, while a number of forward-thinking secondary schools are pioneering the new Scottish Qualifications Authority Award in Scots Language. Another exciting development is Education Scotland’s ‘Scots Language Ambassadors’ initiative, where a team of Scots speakers from all walks of life are pairing up with schools to celebrate and promote Scots. Chefs, shopkeepers, authors, musicians, broadcasters, teachers and senior educationalists have all signed up to form friendly partnerships with schools: their ultimate aim is to promote this national treasure among the next generation of learners.

This article first appeared in the Edinburgh Evening News on Monday 8 December 2014.

A new book club to support Gaelic Medium Education

A new book club, Cuilean Cràicte, is being established to support children and young people in Gaelic Medium Education (GME).  It will be run by a group of volunteers which includes  professional publishers, translators  and parents of those in GME.  The book club will make available each month a Gaelic chapter book.  This will feature hot off the press translations of books by popular authors such as Terry Deary and Frank Cottrell Boyce.  The benefits to children and young people include

  • fostering an interest in reading
  • encouraging independence in reading
  • supporting skills in literacy and Gaelic
  • helping to improve vocabulary
  • helping to increase fluency in Gaelic.

If you wish to join the club, please do so by 15 December 2014.  A minimum number of subscribers is required to enable this club to run. For additional information, please click here.