Here at Carleith Primary School we recently celebrated Scottish week with a whole school cooperative learning activity which was a great success for both the teachers and the pupils.  We wanted to share with you our experience and allow you to view exactly how we conducted this.

Carleith Primary is very lucky to benefit from a school role of under 80 pupils which allows us the space and the resources to conduct a whole school cooperative learning activity.  For our first lesson we congregated in the gym hall and were given a coloured piece of paper.  We were set tasks which allowed us to talk to other pupils we maybe hadn’t really spoken to before or that were in different classes to ourselves.  When we had completed this, we had to arrange ourselves into groups of red, blue, green and yellow pupils according to the paper we had been given at the start.  This became our coop group who we worked with to complete our final design.

Our first task as a group was to come up with a name and a shield design that took into account our likes and interests.  We enjoyed this as our designs and names were personal to us.

For our next lesson we started working on our final design.  We each had a different role in our group.  One person had to research (using the internet) a Scottish artist that we were given by the teachers and write up a summary of their lives and work.  Two of the other people in our group had to recreate the artist’s work using the material of their choice, and the last person had to make a display block/box/frame to display the final piece of work.  When we had each finished our individual task, we took all the pieces together and made an information board for our artist.

To toast our success we had a Scottish celebration afternoon to finish off our project.  We had Scottish dancing, poetry, food and drink and we even had a piper come to play us traditional Scottish music.  We were also given the opportunity to share our final project designs with our friends throughout the school – they were all very impressed.

We hope you enjoy reading about our cooperative learning experience and that we maybe inspire you to try something similar.

The pupils and staff at Carleith Primary School