Subtle cruelty

An interesting incident at work today when a girl came over to another in her group and told her that the group didn’t need any more information and she should stop searching. This was just half an hour into their research, and it appeared to be a unilateral decision made on behalf of the other [...]

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Viking explorers

A common expression from pupils trying to research is the plaintive wail of  “I can’t find anything about …” Feel free to insert the topic of your choice, because it’s always the same. The usual translation is: ‘I’m looking for a website which has the same words in its title as what I’m looking for [...]

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Vikings!

Had a great time with 1st year making Viking posters. We started yesterday by identifying evidence for various kinds of Viking activity (as opposed to just copying from the books).
Today each group took one topic each and after a quick discussion, went off to raid the resources. Six groups, six posters: Raiders, Traders, Farmers, Explorers, [...]

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Do cabbages make good pets?

Mind-mapping goes hand in hand with individual thinking from both pupils and teachers. While one class was trying to memorise their twenty words, their teacher asked “What’s a house cabbage?” We all looked at him (strangely). “Is it a new kind of pet?”, he asked, gesturing at the words on the board. Um, no, it’s [...]

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Scotland’s contribution to science

This started off begged, borrowed and stolen from a colleague. PT Science originally told me that the Faculty wanted to reintroduce an old investigation on famous scientists, which later turned into Scottish scientists, which further transmogrified into “Scotland’s scientific contribution to the world” to allow scientists whose work took place in scotland too. Not that [...]

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In-visible thinking debate

Ah, the best laid plans…
I was doing really well with the Visible Thinking assignment, but induction weeks, the school show and Glow training stopped my involvement in its tracks, and now everyone’s relaxing, and end of term events are happening all over the place.
Including Belgium.
I mention Belgium because it currently contains a sizeable group of [...]

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Questions, questions, questions

I’m fascinated by the change of tone in questions that are coming along to be added to the Debate Wall.
There is a clearly recognisable difference between those that the pupils came up with themselves, which were based in their own experience, particular to the school, and often somewhat biased, and the later additions. Following the Claim-Support-Question routine, the [...]

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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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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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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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