PROJECTBASED LEARNING

A Turkish student is leading her school’s mission for innovation with her amazing, magnetic shoelace-tying device. According to Anadolu Agency, eighteen-year-old Istanbul student Zuleyha Cakir has teamed up with four friends as part of Darüşşafaka High School’s technology and science project.

Now that the new year and new term is well underway, how about trying something new in your classroom? How about trying ‘Genius Hour’?

So many of our schools and classrooms involve a multicultural mix of students and staff. Taking opportunities to include these cultures in lessons and other enrichment activities can help to teach tolerance and tackle prejudice. One way that I get to do that in my classroom, being an Aussie, is through the Australia Day Curriculum Olympics.

During my primary-teaching career of over 40 years, I found that making films with pupils was a perfect way to increase engagement and progress through what becomes covert learning, as they get completely wrapped up in the excitement of having a real purpose for their work; a film premiere in their school or even the local community. For children who live in today’s digital age, it is the perfect way to combine the school’s primary agenda (to show improvement) with that of a child; to have as much fun as possible.

It can be easy to forget that a child’s mind works in a wildly-different way to that of an adult. DesignBox Architecture director Philip Wells was reminded of this when he ran a series of creative workshops at a London primary school...

Children learn very quickly. Their learning patterns are led by their conceptual thoughts at first, and then by experience as they get older. When children are faced with new challenges, their thinking methods are not confined to established preconceptions of how things should look or work. Instead they are more fluid, often very confident and usually unique.

It has been quite a time since I started to use CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) as a hook to engage students into a range of key (and often for them, boring) subjects. For me it was Science and ICT (Information Communication Technology), but it can be used to develop literacy and numeracy skills, as well as those soft skills such as collaboration and problem solving that can be difficult to plan into busy timetables.

If affordable, introducing students to foreign countries is well worth considering. Sarah Williams, assistant headteacher and head of Sixth Form at Sir Henry Floyd Grammar School, has found that fundraising is a great way to get these trips off the ground.

Getting students involved in fundraising activities can really add value to their school education (excuse the pun!). By letting pupils take responsibility for driving fundraising events, it not only teaches them more about the value of money, but also helps to develop broader skills which will stand them in good stead once they leave school.

Secondary and primary teachers across Wales have been faced with the challenge of embedding the Literacy and Numeracy Framework (LNF) into their whole school curriculums. Ambitious in scope, the LNF is a planning and assessment tool that maps key literacy and numeracy statements from the start of KS2 through to the end of KS3. Pupils will be assessed against the framework, as well as sitting annual national reading, numerical reasoning and numerical procedural tests every May.

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