Paperclip Newsletter -
Last updated 20th June 2009
First steamship arrives in London 1819
AUTUMN TERM WORKSHOPS
Looking ahead we are planning a science and maths workshop with the support of Tameside EMA team on 15th October 2009. Further details will be posted in a week or so, but please let us know if you want a place. We're keeping the costs at £55.00 per person or £90.00 for two participants from the same school. A few pictures to remind you of the other attractions in the area!
Steve and I are looking for an LA to support our second autumn term workshop - you can choose the theme and we can offer free places!
WEBSITE
A lot of new activities have been added to the website recently but not all the links are in place. My priority for the summer to is to tidy up the website. In the meantime you can find more new activities on our workshop pages:
Doncaster and Wolverhampton Humanities
NEW ACTIVITIES ON SLAVERY
Anna Tomlinson has sent in two brilliant activities about the abolition of slavery suitable for KS3.
Abolition Act 1807 - character cards and timeline
BLUE FOOTED BOOBY TO CELEBRATE
DARWIN'S BIRTHDAY
Parliament is considering the possibility of making 12th February a national day to celebrate the ideas of Charles Darwin, born two hundred years ago, but still relevant and controversial today. Would you like to try out this information gap suitable for Year 9 up to encourage discussion and provide links to the many resources available this year:
Download Darwin's birthday here!
P.S. Many thanks to everyone who provided corrections and useful suggestions. They have been incorporated so please take a look at the new version uploaded on 3rd February 2009.
SCIENCE AND POWERPOINT WORKSHOPS
Many thanks to all the colleagues who attended these workshops, and thanks too for the positive evaluations. We are now aiming to double the number of science and maths activities online over the next few months. The powerpoint participants are experimenting with powerpoint activities that encourage collaboration while working on the computer or whiteboard. You can find our first attempts online at:
www.collaborativelearning.org/estimatingmultiplication.ppt
www.collaborativelearning.org/whatshape.ppt
They are a bit basic, since, if you add lots of animations etc. it bumps up the megabytage (this one is only 3-4MB). If they grew too large, they would be too big to put online. All the noises are the basic ones available on powerpoint, although of course you can record your own or download noises off the internet. My aim is to produce as entertaining an activity as possible, while making it small enough to post online. I'd welcome comments and suggestions. One other problem is that there are several versions of powerpoint and the activities don't transfer well from one to the other; pictures disappear and fonts change. On the other hand powerpoint is free software and everyone has it. If you want, you can use the activity as a template for developing your own more sophisticated versions and with careful cutting and pasting you can preserve the hyperlinks. We hope to produce more activities soon.
NEW RESOURCES FOR FOUNDATION AND KEY STAGE ONE
We ran a workshop in Leicester last May and the activities we developed are now beginning to appear on the website. You can find games around Harry and the Robots, Pants and Dirty Bertie. The Gruffalo is imminent! We have tried to provide with some games you can try out, but we would like you and your children to devise better looking versions. We would be very pleased if you could send us any of your activities. For copyright reasons we are not able to post images from the books on the website but, for instance, we would love to have children's versions of robots, germs and pants.
Did you MEET THE PLARGS?
If you liked them you might like to play TOO MANY APOSTROPHES! which is a new activity that would be very popular with greengrocers!
WORK IN PROGRESS
Colleagues at recent workshops have expressed the desire to network activities, that are not quite ready to put on the website as tried and tested. If you want to look at, respond to or post activities that we are currently tweaking, refining and improving please go to this link.
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.
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.
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.