First meeting of the year: Thursday 25th Oct 2012 Agenda 0. Jaffa Cakes!! Do you know how they are made? Year 9 taste testing to follow in the year.
1. Explain what they will need to do. 2. How are they finding the course so far? 3. Do they like using workbooks (Yr10)/ exercise books (Yr 9)? 4. How are they finding the pace? 5. How are they finding the topics covered? 6. How are they coping with terminology? 7. Any comments/feedback?
Group aims: 1. To explore numeracy across the curriculum. 2. To ensure consistent use of numeracy key terms and teaching techniques. My aims: 1. To explore numeracy in the Business finance unit. 2. To support a set 6 with numeracy in the spreadsheet unit. Bar chart challenge Food names are discrete data and so should have gaps in between the bars. Continuous data should not have gaps in between bars. Discrete - Pie chart, bar chart. Continuous - line graphs.
Key Words - FREQUENCY, CONTINUOUS, DISCRETE QWC now tested in Maths exam. Skills Map How we use numeracy: IT - Scales in graphics/formulae and graphs in spreadsheets Business - Breakeven graphs/balance sheets
This week my Year 9 pupils started their marketing project. I gave them the theme of Wildern school and said they could advertise anything to do with the school. The first session today was planning. Pupils had to decide what they were going to advertise and how they were going to do it. At the start of the lesson I got them to write down as many adjectives as they could that they had seen heard or used in marketing. Each managed about 6 words and all included the word "amazing". To help them out, I showed them some example adverts. The M&S food advert being particularly useful to them.. I then showed them the T Mobile advert "Welcome Home".
When I asked them whether this was a good advert or not, only half a dozen said yes but the rest could not decide either way. We talked about whether they would know what it was advertising had the T Mobile advert not come up at the end and decided probably not. However a pupil pointed out that it did keep you interested as you tried to work out who it was by. We also talked about how memorable it was and that every student instantly recognised it. I am hoping that showing them this advert will prompt some of them to make more obscure adverts for Wildern rather than just filming at locations around school. We shall wait and see...
I had the opportunity to observe my colleague James Theobald, an English teacher, using SOLO (Structure of Observed Learning Outcome) to develop his Year 10s' evaluative writing. I have been working with him in order to improve the quality of my Year 10 boys' review writing. I had 2 aims for our joint project, firstly to make sure the boys were actually reviewing their work and evaluating their products, not just describing what they had done. The second was to look in to SOLO and possibly implement it in some way.
SOLO taxonomy is about (in basic terms) getting pupils from not knowing anything about a particular skill/task, to being able to identify key terms often used when carrying out the task and how they are used. It moves on to applying the skills learnt to a completely different scenario/topic. (Apologies for my poor explanation - I'm still trying to get to grips with it..)
Observation James' lesson had SOLO stations. Each station was a different stage of SOLO and pupils had to decide which stage they were currently at. They had had 2 previous lessons on this and so were able to identify an example of each stage. Pupils decided when they were ready to progress to the next table. James could monitor progress by keeping an eye on pupils' movement around the room. (Ofsted tick!)
For the topic of evaluation, the stations started with what is evaluating then moved on to identifying evaluative terms and beginning to recognise connections between the terms used. Next it moved on to understanding how to evaluate and applying those skills by evaluating some thing. In James' case, he asked pupils to make something out of an arts and crafts kit then evaluate their creation. Pupils' knew they would be evaluating these and so some specifically tried to make the creations in a manner that was easy to evaluate.
My attempt Having observed James, I feel confident enough to attempt a similar lesson with my Year 10 boys but would go through the stages as a whole class rather than using the stations. I think knowing that class, the boys would be too easily distracted and so would not necessarily move on on their own. The boys are really in to football (surprise, surprise) and so the Euros are a convenient topic to provide example reviews. James suggested finding a clip of something like MOTD where the commentators review the game rather than getting the boys to read an article. This would definitely suit them better. I am also planning to use previous years' reviews as these are on a slightly different topic and so can be useful without being something the boys can copy.
James and I also discussed the school's whole school literacy plan which is trying to ensure that departments are tackling literacy with a consistent approach. We talked about how many other subjects must do evaluative writing and just assume pupils are taught it in English and so expect them to just get on with it.
