Tuesday 8 September 2009

New Project

A new year and a new project. Some of us met today to discuss where we might go with our change school work this year. We still have the notion that we are developing our teachers to develop our children's creativity, but now we have added an intention to develop speaking and listening. We recognise that children can't write better than they speak, so if we can improve aspects of speaking, then it follows that we can improve aspects of writing.

Our tools for developing these areas are film-making and our local area. We have come up with a working enquiry question that is "What is the story of our home and how can we tell it to others?" We have discussed a model of film-making where the film maker records the stories of some individuals and then gets them to tell her where to go next to find out more stories. We are hoping to use this model in some way to answer our enquiry question. We will start with the teachers planning rambling routes for our local area, followed up by investigating anything special about the routes from Birmingham archives. We are hoping to keep this 'safe' for the teachers, working form a place where they are comfortable to a place where they can become passionate about developing knowledge of the local area, keeping in mind our overall intention of developing creativity and speaking and listening.

That's as much as I'm going to say at the moment. It sounds vague maybe, but clarity will come...

2 comments:

  1. I'm excited by:

    Investigating and representing the local area through approaches as diverse as online map making and working with mud.

    Learning about the community and its history by getting out there with cameras.

    The possibility of building a learning and playing space in the school grounds.

    The idea of creating a screening network to share our films with other schools, and to see the films they are making.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think project may lack details, but the project is not vague. It is an open ended enquiry, to allow children, teachers, CPs to effectively direct (and change direction) of the project, without losing our overall aim.

    The project builds well on previous year, having identified areas we could improve:

    SIP - Speaking and writing skills

    OFSTED - Our Culture

    SHINE - Better learning when moving and outside classroom and finding out for ourselves, working more closely with teachers, use of film, cars and scaletrix to better engage and involve.

    End Eval Teachers comments - Real reflection involving more effective time talking and communicating to all work colleagues as well as children.

    End Eval CP comments - More child-led activity throughout the project and more effective communication.

    A great start and looking forward to how things develop.

    ReplyDelete