Diversity

The class teachers are now diversifying their strategies. Two have held class discussions regarding social lies before viewing the Disinformation website. One of the classes viewed the website together and discussed each section as they went through it, while the other looked through it in pairs and discussed their thoughts afterwards.
The third class came along to try out [...]

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Blackness Castle Pier

Spotted this on Flickr. I think it’s a sculpture. If it is, then it’s a great sculpture. If it’s not then it’s still a great sculpture.

Blackness Castle Pier
Originally uploaded by Ken J. Fitzpatrick

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Compulsory PE debate

I’m a bit concerned about how the debate is developing. Not surprisingly, most of the questions appearing are firmly based in pupils’ own likes and dislikes, and their experiences following the change to two periods of PE a week last year. Much of the conversation at that time revolved around the comparative value of PE, Maths and English, and [...]

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Google Maps A-Z

Another great site discovered by the Zebraboy.
Nice to know there more lunatics out there, even if they only get the chance to be insane because they’re off work. It only took Rachel Blair 15 hours to play about on Google Maps to find representations of every letter. I doubt if I could have been bothered [...]

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Sensory Garden: worse damage to the haikus! Emergency! Help!

Bad weather has pretty much destroyed all of the haikus that had already been attached to the fence.
So, either we go with the A4 idea and tie them top and bottom to the fence (which I’d rather not do, since I made such a big deal about it to the pupils, and they worked so [...]

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Reading inventions

Last year, I happened to mention to a class that one benefit of getting the bus home was that I could read, and that I could often read a book overnight.  I expressed disappointment that I couldn’t do the same in the car.
While most pupils expressed incredulity (or horror) at reading so much, one boy [...]

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Visible thinking

Had a meeting with my three partners in crime from the English department today to work out an outline for our debating.
EM has got really into the whole idea, and is off and running with it. I’ve already mentioned the maths as an example of Visible Thinking that she used with her class. Well today [...]

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Performing a balancing act

It’s proving very difficult to find suitable published evidence for the Visible Thinking debate on compulsory PE . I want to provide each class with the same selection of published evidence for pupils to use with the Claim-Support-Question routine. This should provide some “expert” opinions and information, as well as generating further questions.
I’ve hit three main problems:

useful numeric [...]

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Thinking, cogitating, pondering, dreaming…eureka!

First class in today for the Visible Thinking project. The plan is to get them to think about “thinking” by asking them to come up with as many words as they can that involve thinking.
They sat in groups, and I passed out sheets of paper and post-its, explained the work and away they went. To [...]

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Motion sickness

Over the Easter holidays I thought about the Visible Thinking assignment, in particular, which topic to investigate, and concluded that we should ask the pupils themselves what they would like to investigate. I put this idea to EM, who agreed (and then told me that I was now working with  three out of the five English classes). 
From the [...]

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