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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SLF09: S1 Thematic weeks @ Dumbarton Academy

Since I promote the Library Resource Centre as being at the heart of cross-curricular-dom, I thought it would be interesting to see how another secondary has tackled cross-curricular projects. This presentation from Dumbarton Academy discussed two specific projects: the Health and Well-being themed Fit 4 Life and the Citizenship-based 1 World (NB the school has [...]

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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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Back to basics

A new term, a new crop of assistants, happy to help so long as it doesn’t require too much work, and especially, too much thought. Tough.
This week is all about starting to get them familiar with the workings of the LRC, before I let them loose on the general school population. Today there were a [...]

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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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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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