Term 2 draws to a close

It's been a wonderful term at Cotswold - busy, but lots of fun.
One of the things I have been able to do this year is give a small group of children from each Grade 1 and 2 class an opportunity to consolidate phonics skills. They open Starfall and use the material at an appropriate level. Those children who suffer from problems with concentration in the classroom get to put on earphones and focus on the programme without distraction. I have not yet worked out a method of assessing the benefit of this method but hopefully we will get there.
The major fundraising activity has been the Spelling Bee. The children had to learn their list of words and on 6 June they wrote the test. There are some great photos on our Facebook page (Cotswold Preparatory School). In their computer lessons they typed their words into a word cloud program and this gave them lots of practice at getting their spellings correct whilst enjoying a novel way of presenting them. A satisfying amount of sponsorship funds was raised.
The Spelling Bee was followed by a Father's Day soccer skills day. The dads (and some mums) came to school on Friday 15th to play games with their children. We had a boerewors and chips sale and it was a great community building day.
In the computer lab the focus has been on the Olympic Games. We are proud of how our wiki is looking. Sadly not many other countries added their information because most are now on their summer break. Our Grade 3's learnt a lot and we will be using wikis again later in the year so we have had a good introduction. The teacher is also on a steep learning curve! Click here for the link to our Global Olympic Project.
Before we started the Olympics project Grade 2V participated in a short project with Global Classroom. It was the Global Lunch Project mentioned in an earlier blog post where children from around the world shared what they bring to school for lunch.
The new CAPS curriculum largely ignores the integration of technology at the foundation phase level so I often feel quite isolated in my work. The teachers are under so much pressure with assessments and keeping up with the compulsory weekly themes that there is little time to think about the integration of technology for teaching and learning. For them, computer lessons mean they have only half of their class for one period a week and it gives them an opportunity to assess one of the many tasks with the other half of the class.
And now we are ready to enjoy our three week winter break. I'm looking forward to the challenges of the new term.

Of Olympics and Learning

Last week the children started learning about the Olympics. One forgets that last time the Olympics were on many of them were only four years old so there isn't much that they remember about that event. The fact that it took place in Beijing in a very different time zone meant that they didn't get to see much of it on TV. It's a whole new world for them. I have set up a project wiki linked to the Global Classroom. It's been exciting to see how many people have visited our site. The grade 3's are beginning to discover what the Games is all about and they've enjoyed watching videos on gymnastics so far. We've also had to gain a rudimentary understanding of time zones and international travel. I'm sure that once the Olympic Games happen they will be excited to watch the events and be quite knowledgeable about such a global event.

Word Clouds for Spelling Practice

The children are preparing for a spelling bee competition next month. The grade 3's have thirty words to learn. This week they used a new way to practice their spellings with ABCya word clouds. Here is a slide show of 3P's work. Please note the programme drops all the capital letters - it's not the children's fault.

Spelling bee word clouds

View more presentations from Brenda Hallowes.

Unfortunately some of the classes didn't get to do the word clouds because of all the public holidays. Perhaps we can try and catch up next week. Enjoy!

Global Project

Today one of our Grade 3 classes is participating in the Global Lunch Table project. This involves joining the wiki and uploading a presentation which shows what children in our school typically bring for lunch. We took some photos and used Microsoft Photo Story to build a slide show. Here is our example.

Giving our children opportunities to produce items for a global audience is a great 21st Century activity.

New challenges

I’ve had a good start to the year in the computer lab. It’s also been exciting as I have been creating a new curriculum for the integration of computers in our school. The grade threes have been working on their project on bullying, grade twos are doing activities on All about Me, computer hardware and Our School.


This year the grade ones seem to be even less sophisticated compared to previous years. The few that have access to computers at home stand out and are very competent but the majority of the children are just learning to use a mouse for the first time. I'm sure that by the end of this term they will be doing well as if they were born with a mouse in their hands.
From now until the end of the term I will not be in the computer lab. I am swopping classes with a colleague who has health issues. I will be taking a grade three class until a new teacher can be appointed for next term. My colleague will be supervising learners in the computer lab and we will be using educational games for this period. There are some great sites like starfall.com and multiplication.com which the children love. We now have a faster, uncapped internet connection which allows us to do this.
I am hoping to get my grade three class blogging. If I do I’ll post a link from this blog. Watch this space….

Getting along.

This is a great little video to use as a discussion starter. I hope to use it with my classes next year.

Bridge from Ting on Vimeo.

It could be used to discuss the choices we make in our behaviour. Brute force versus co-operation. During the first term we will be doing a project on bullying and I'm thinking of using this video as a discussion starter.

Here is another little fun activity from Larry Ferlazzo's blog. If you haven't followed Larry on Twitter or read his blog do it today. Thank you Larry for all your inspiring links.

So what is happening in our child-free school?

We seem to have been at school without the learners forever - although it's only been one week. We all agree on one thing - we couldn't have accomplished the volume of preparation without this week. The teachers have typed up schedules and lessons and edited and re-typed.... We're all becoming very comfortable with using computers for admin tasks.

I have been interested to watch groups of teachers getting together to collaborate on their planning, share ideas and tasks, make a big noise while they do it and obviously have fun. It's a bit like a reflection of the way learners interact when working together in groups. It's stimulating, busy and sometimes deafening. At the same time a lot is being achieved and we are getting to grips with our new curriculum and how to implement it.

I don't have a "partner" teacher and do all my own preparation in consultation with the teachers and the topics they are covering in the class. Next year I will be writing my own curriculum as I go along as we can no longer afford to use a "canned" curriculum. More and more parents are not paying school fees and this is putting a strain on the school budget for the extras such as computers and extra equipment. I am enjoying the process of making up my lessons so far but envy the grade teachers who work in groups and produce a collaborative effort. Teamwork is a 21st Century learning goal and one that we should be encouraging amongst our learners.

So here's to the end of the 2011 academic year. We have two more days to go to wind up our activities and then it's a four week break before we return to school for a new year, new classes and lots of changes promised by our principal of only 3 months. Bring it on..... after a rest of course!