Paperclip Newsletter -
Last updated 6th May 2008
EVERY CHILD MATTERS
Another excellent value, not to missed conference organised by the London Association for Teaching English on 10th May!! Details on www.late.org.uk. You can book by email and pay at the door.
COLLABORATIVE LEARNING ON TEACHERS' TV
In the broadcast "Teaching Talking 2" which can be downloaded or just watched on: http://www.teachers.tv/video/1493 a newly qualified teacher designs an inclusive collaborative lesson with Year 8 pupils on the novel "Holes" by Louis Sachar. She then discusses it with her John Yandell, her tutor, from the London Institute of Education. You can find a collaborative activity on "Holes" on the site here.
SILENT LETTER GAMES MADE MORE ATTRACTIVE
This activity has been on the Becta inclusion site for some years. It is now a lot more attractive and there are two versions: one for KS1 and one for KS2.
REACHING THE PARTS PHONICS DOESN'T REACH
Here is a very simple but effective way of helping Reception and Year 1 children remember sight vocabulary: those very frequent words which cannot be sounded out.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO HELP US WITH MATHS DEVELOPMENT WORK?
We are working on increasing the number of activities to support maths and have been adapting some on the inspiring activities shared online by teachers on the TES resource base. If you would like to help us please take a look ot the most recent activity we are working on.
OUR ING AND ED TREE HAS BECOME A STALK but you don't have to draw it now and it is the right size to print from computer or colour photocopier. Quicklook and Full Activity.
BARRIER GAMES: want to try digging up Pompeii? Is what you have found Roman or 21st century Italian ? Try our revised version of digging up a Roman town. Quicklook here and full activity here!
THERE or THEIR??? WITH SUPPORT FROM NOTTINGHAM ALIENS.
This activity would be nothing without the careful observations and artistic skills of the year 8s at Nottingham Bluecoat School. Quicklook here and full activity here! It is also an activity in the spirit of the new English framework (on public release on 6th March!); it combines correctness with creativity! To accompany it we have jazzed up the collections activity (all about prides of lions and gaggles of geese) and now including plops of pigeons and bruises of boxers. Quicklook here and full activity here!
WHO EATS WHAT IN THE WOODS?
This activity - matching animals with what they eat - and a connect four game to help children remember has now been updated with pictures. The name has been changed since it does not go as far as food chains or pyramids, but we're working on that at the moment! We'd like you to try it out and send any corrections additions or suggestions (including better pictures) since our sources may not be as reliable as yours. It's a big file, about 5MB, but you can have a quicklook at it here. Full activity can be downloaded here.
PARTNERSHIP TEACHING
Thank you everyone who responded to my request for information about what is happening at the moment with partnership teaching. It is good to hear that there is a steady and maybe slightly growing interest in partnership work. It turns out to still be maybe the most powerful way at raising awareness and building capacity for the best provision for children new to English. The biggest problem at the moment is that it is not a quick fix, but requires reliability and patience on the part of EMA consultants. If, however, every EMA consultant spent half a day a week on partnership work, we would be ten times more effective than all the other initiatives that we have encountered since the strategy embraced EAL issues. There is increasing evidence that partnership teaching delivers, and even Ofsted acknowledges its power in producing confident teachers of bilingual learners. It also produces more collaborative resources that produce confident children.
TRACK GAMES AT FOUNDATION STAGE
In the eighties and and nineties we ran many workshops to develop games and activities around popular stories such as Peace at Last, The Hungry Caterpillar or Handa's Surprise. We are planning to put some of these on CD rom since the files are too large to put online. However, we have posted an introduction to using track games in the early years to encourage literacy and numeracy. You can find it here.
RECENT ACTIVITIES FOR ENGLISH
Lots more activites posted on teaching Shakespeare (take a look at the revised list) and a new picture version for Holes: quicklook here.
The full activities can be downloaded from the online activities list here.
WORKSHOPS
We will be posting resources from our two science/maths workshops this term shortly. Our next planned workshops are:
24th June 2008 in Kensington and Chelsea for Humanities KS2-5 with a London flavour. This workshop is for K&C teachers, but there will be places for colleagues from other LAs.
Further details will be soon available online.
A NEW BOOK ON COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
Valerie Coultas has written a book:
Constructive Talk in Challenging Classrooms – strategies for behaviour management and talk based tasks. Routledge 2007 ISBN 978-0-415-40343-6 It provides a lot of suggestions for setting up collaborative work and combined it with a trenchant history of speaking and listening. It is directed towards secondary English teachers, but is also extremely useful for teachers in other phases, other subjects and for everyone working with EAL. I have written a review of the book for NATE English and Media magazine which you can download here.
DUAL LANGUAGE BOOKS
Raymonde Sneddon and colleagues at University of East London have put together a useful website on using and researching dual language books; information that goes well with the information below. You can reach it from here. I am planning a research section on this site (page not active yet!!) and will post these kind of links there in future.
TRANSLITERATE, TRANSLITERATE!
You may have come across Charmiane Kenner's research on first languages and her work in using transliteration to empower bilingual learners to use English phonemes to write in their other languages. This activity, Bank Four, for KS1 to speed up rapid subtraction and addition is currently also offered in transliterated Punjabi and our aim is with your help to add a host of other languages. Please take a look and even if you don't want to play the maths game at KS1, you may want to make it a language activity for Years 5, 6, 7...... Take a further look at the maths activities because we are adding more each day.
We have just added a game board for the Weather Connect Four activity in Polish and anticipate lots more activities in first languages (or half in first languages which is a good incentive for collaboration!) to support new arrivals.
FEEDBACK PLEASE!!!
Thanks to those of you who are now providing feedback. If you are downloading and using materials could you email stuart.scott@collaborativelearning.org, and let me know which activities you are deciding to use in class. I will then know which activities are the most popular, and which ones I need to put more of online. We hold about 500 activities developed before the world went digital. And please, please send me your activities or links to them on your websites. It now does not seem likely that the strategy are prepared to provide links on their new website to this project and similar networks outside their control, so it looks like as if we will continuing to rely on local authorities to spread the word.
PLANNING FRAMEWORK for literacy:
We produced a planning framework about eighteen months ago for making sure that activities (including collaborative learning activities) were appropriately built in at the planning stage. This framework is specifically designed to ensure that work for bilingual learners is included, but as is usually the case, whatever turns out to work well for bilingual learners, works for all other learners as well. We have not had time to revise it for the new framework but it still works! Please download it, try it out and feed back any comments or corrections. It is quick to download because we have managed to get in onto a single sheet of A4, but you will find it easier to read if you enlarge it to A3! You can download it here.
SIMILE BINGO AND YOU CAN'T STIFLE CREATIVITY
We are promoting and building upon the now available digitally via Ron Carter at Nottingham University LINC (Language in the National Curriculum) materials, censored, condemned and stifled with the Oracy Project and all the good initiatives around speaking and listening by a government wanting us all to speak as well as write in Standard English in 1991, and decidedly not revived by our 'new' government in 1997. After fifteen years of official neglect, the materials are still relevant, inspiring and useful for teachers wanting to encourage their pupils to think around language at all ages and stages.
This simile activity was inspired by LINC. Can you decide? Download quicklook here and full activity here. We want to produce a multilingual version of this activity, so could you send us cliched similes in other languages.
NEW ARRIVALS:
The NALDIC new arrivals conferences on 4th May in Cambridge and 22nd in Durham were both lively events, and participants had a chance to preview the materials from the DCSF/London Challenge New Arrivals Project. The materials contain lots of opportunities for collaborative work, as well as offering models for spreading collaborative work across all subjects. The project consulted widely and wisely, and has consequently incorporated much of the advice we offered on this site, and lots of the advice from local authority websites. If newly arrived pupils experience ten minutes of active learning in every lesson, that will be ten times better than only encountering it in their English lessons or induction sessions. We would encourage schools with children new to English to try out collaborative activities in all curriculum areas, and we will do our best to provide plenty to try out. The New Arrivals project now has information and case studies on the DCSF website , and I think you will find it to be one of the best resources for EAL they have produced since the Partnership Teaching Project in 1990.
This LA website has been added to our list because it contains lots of good activities and advice for new arrivals.
DON'T GET ILL IN THE SUMMER HOLIDAYS
If your current lifestyle means that only the ban on smoking in public places is going to prevent you from getting ill this summer, then maybe you had better take a look at (single page quick look) Another Nail in your Coffin This activity was first developed over 25 years ago and unfortunately is still relevant in the classroom. Would you be interested in helping to produce a modern version? You can download the full activity here.
REFUGEE WEEK (NOW PAST BUT ALWAYS RELEVANT)
We have posted an activity on migration which is geared to primary/lower secondary. We would like to produce a more complex version with more information (social/historical/economic) from older or wiser children. We would appreciate any corrections, additions, suggestions.
WORKSHOPS
Many thanks to everyone who helped to make the poetry workshop a success, by spreading the word and of course attending. If you go to the poetry section of the English and Literature materials you will find an increasing number of activities which are designed to encourage children to talk about and read more poetry.
WINDOWS OPENING FOR TALK!!
More time for talk. More time for role play. More time for reflection. Less time for worksheets and colouring in pins, bins, pots, and cots. Less time for top down do it this way or else training via PDMs, and more time for collaborative planning. That will I hope be the effect of the new framework. Teachers are now able to spend the valuable time they are with other teachers planning longer units of work where the writing comes at the end of the unit not at the end of the first lesson. The fact that the framework does not have to be implemented yesterday, and there is plenty of leadin time, means that teachers are planning together, and not rushing out to buy off the peg activities which put children back on the worksheet treadmill.
WILL THE TAIL WAG THE DOG?
There is one authority where literacy coordinators are spending a day together on planning. Groups of three or four coordinators are planning a unit of work each. This means that five or six units get planned in a day. Coordinators are trying out their planning in school, ironing out the creaks and are then exchanging their plans with the other groups. This is an ideal way to plan for talk, and make the most effective use of planning time. Initially I thought that this idea had been suggested by the Primary Strategy, but I was too optimistic. It is the idea of one consultant in one authority! Apparently the strategy is still a bit bogged down in its past, and is going to find it very difficult to move from a directive approach to a consultative sharing one. There is probably going to have to be a fair bit of grass roots tail wagging to turn the Strategy juggernaut in a talk friendly direction. Sorry about the mixed metaphor!
SILENT CLASSROOMS
Are your senior managers still reluctant to release you to plan for collaborative talk? Show them this extract from Ofsted's review of inspection evidence. You will also find a growing series of links on the same page providing access to research that supports constructive talk. There is a growing realisation that schools must provide time and opportunity for talk and that quality talk must be carefully planned and that this planning needs time.
Have you tried this game with your pupils? This activity has, surprisingly, been very popular (since 1984) that here it is online. I suppose it could be said it doesn't beat around the bush, and is probably so successful because it goes over the top.
BRIGHTENING UP MENTAL MATHS
Do you want to improve the speed of your, and your student's mental maths? You may have already tried out the estimating maths games on the maths online page, but do you want to try our new tables game? It is of course a language conscious activity, and you can find it here. "Work in progress" activities are still getting feedback from colleagues so please report back, if you find they could work better with a bit of tweaking. The Primary National Strategy is now very keen for us to network activities, and are setting up an interactive website which we hope to link into. We are also currently updating our literacy activities which work well at Key Stage 2 and 3. If you have any suggestions for improvements please send them to us.
GO TO BRISTOL! GO TO BRISTOL!
The Bristol EMA site is adding a lot more collaborative activities. They are also producing more attractive versions of some of our activities so please take a look here!
STORYPROPS AND GAMES GO LIVE
There has been a big increase recently in requests for storyprops and games by post. This may be partly because our national mailing for the New Arrivals conference last June has led to a lot of hits on this site. Since the project has no secretary, please be patient if you have put in an order. The project holds story props for over three hundred books and related games for nealy a hundred. We are going to start to scan these materials and make them available via email. We are unlikely to put lots of them online, since we suspect book publishers might not like it, even though using the props and games leads to more books being purchased, so it could be seen as free advertising! Here you can find lotto boards for Peace at Last to show you examples of what we plan to have available. As we scan them we will catalogue them here.
IRISH HISTORY - EASTER RISING AND ANGLO-IRISH WAR
The new Ken Loach film, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and the new curriculum allowing us to teach the British Empire, has inspired to resusticate some very successful materials developed in the ILEA in 1983. These activities provide a lot of explanations for our relationship with Ireland from then until recently. Please take a look at Ireland 1916 We originally used the materials with year 8 and 9.
Visits to Margaret McMillan School in Islington
The school is undergoing extensive and delayed building work, and will not be able to accept visitors until the work is completed at the end of 2007 or even later than that.
ROBIN ALEXANDER AND DIALOGIC TEACHING:
If you want to read Robin's paper in full it is available on his website since my summary in the last newsletter was very sketchy. You will also find information about his publications and the work on developing dialogic teaching in Yorkshire and Barking.
Collaborative Learning Project.
17, Barford Street, London N1 0QB UK
PHONE 0044 20 7226 8885
FAX now only available on request since we have no dedicated faxline
EMAIL: stuart.scott@collaborativelearning.org
The COLLABORATIVE LEARNING PROJECT was established in Inner London in 1983. It is now an independent and non-profit making educational trust: a support for a network of teachers across all phases and across the curriculum, throughout the UK and increasingly beyond. The enthusiasm and hard work of teachers has kept us in existence. We have always aimed to develop, disseminate and celebrate effective group work cooperatively, by sharing classroom activities which can be used as they are, or the strategies contained in them can be adapted to other subject matter or different age groups. Every activity has been tried out in many classrooms, and by using them, we hope you then will be inspired to develop other materials along similar lines, and send them back to the project. In this way we can keep abreast of curriculum changes.
Why collaborative learning? What exactly do we mean by it ? Are you interested in looking at some of the ideas that underpin our work? Here is a list of frequently asked questions and some answers, with a request for your own ideas. For those interested in students learning English or those working with students learning another language of instruction, the paper below discusses the value of collaborative learning for students in multilingual classrooms An introduction to Collaborative Learning: extending thinking and creating contexts for developing academic language in multilingual classrooms.