Anda di halaman 1dari 4

December 2011

WILLOWS REVIEW OF THE YEAR SO FAR!


At the end of this first long term, a third of the way through the teaching year, I like to look back over the term and ask the children to note down as many activities as they can remember doing since we started out together in September. We then draw together our different lists to compile a single class list. This year we described 75 distinct activities or areas of work. I grouped the activities into general subject areas to create a checklist that allowed the children to score every activity on a scale between 0 and 6, where 0 = Very bad and 6 = Really good. It looked like this:
Name: Very bad 0 Really good 6

Art

DT Englis h

1 2 3 4 Wool wrap pictures Drawing/shading a vegetable Winter scenes black, silver and gold Design packaging for unhealthy food Mosaic Design your own Christmas card Design your own calendar Making Christmas boxes, stars and chains Letter to Mr Cornish about summer holiday Poems Personification and Imagery Instructions on washing our hands Film narrative The Piano & other films Thinking about different genres Figure 1. Top section of the scoring sheet we used to rank our activities

By adding up everyones score for a particular activity we can get a rough indication of how stimulating, interesting and satisfying the different activities have been. One person was away on the day we did this so we had 19 score sheets. The maximum number of points any activity could get was therefore 19 x 6 = 114. These are a few of the things we found out.

Overall satisfaction
A Maximum Satisfaction score would occur if somebody gave a score of 6 to every activity in the list but I would not expect many, if any, children to score all that we have done so far with a top mark. Figure 2 shows the range of overall satisfaction across the class. Two or three children are obviously very satisfied with the majority of things we have done while the majority of the class has returned an overall satisfaction of between 40 to 65%. Only two children returned a score of less than 40%. This analysis is not a rigorous assessment of learning, it is more an opportunity to reflect on the terms work and have a bit of fun. Nevertheless, I tell myself that the majority of the class are content with what we are doing as a class for the majority of the time. What I need to do is take account of those few who returned the lower scores and aim to make their learning experiences more satisfying.

December 2011

Figure 2. Overall satisfaction amongst 19 members of Willow class

Top 20 Activities
Ranking 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Activity Making Christmas boxes, stars and chains Forest School Trip to Boulogne Pantomime Ali Baba Winter scenes black, silver and gold End of unit tests Trip to Witney Hospital Design your own calendar Weekly tables/challenge test Quiet reading Making animated PowerPoint Multiplying with decimals Class assembly Mean, mode, median and range Investigations looping numbers Rounding numbers & decimal places Map challenge finding places on a map Mosaic Solving word problems Chunking methods for division Table 1. The top 20 activities Score 89% 87% 86% 84% 81% 78% 77% 74% 74% 73% 73% 72% 71% 70% 70% 69% 69% 68% 68% 68%

It is pleasing to see that eight of the top 20 activities are maths based and two of these, ranked 6th and 9th, focus on testing. There is certainly healthy competition within Willow class but more than this the children enjoy this quantifiable means of gauging their own progress, not against each other but against their own past record. It is not surprising to see that some of the more exotic events such as the trip to Boulogne, the day at forest school, the trip to the pantomime and the morning at
2

December 2011

Witney Hospital scored very highly. These special events are hugely popular and are nearly always the stuff that our lasting memories of school are made of. Who can honestly say, when we reflect back on our school days, that we still treasure the moment when we finally mastered the use of the apostrophe, vital though that skill may be. But a trip to Boulogne where you used your French for real to buy a croissant and your friend left his coat on a bench those things stay with you. What is more striking is how much the class enjoyed the satisfaction of cutting and folding old Christmas cards to make simple gift boxes. It was a fun activity for the last week of term but several children excelled at it and many more found it a real pleasure and source of satisfaction was it really the highlight of the year so far?

The Bottom Five Activities


Ranking 71 72 73 74 75 Activity Wednesday music Using apostrophes The water cycle Class story Slave of Jerusalem Writing instructions on washing our hands Score 38% 37% 36% 32% 27%

Like the most popular activities, the least favoured are spread across the curriculum, specifically music, punctuation, science, a class story and a writing task. Something has to come towards the bottom of the heap but it is unusual to find the class story ranked so low. This was a story with a complicated plot line and a lot of characters with names that proved difficult to remember. Read silently this would be a good read but it was always up-hill as a class story and I fully understand its low scoring. Unfortunately we moved on to read one of the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer and this has also received a very mixed from the class!
Note to self: Review the place of a whole class story with the class and give them more input into the choice of book.

Best homework tasks


Figure 3 shows that the homework tasks that we listed and ranked (both the routine and the longer project pieces) have proved widely popular. When I did the same type of ranking activity with Ginkgo class last year the weekly maths homework scored a mere 39% suggesting it was not widely enjoyed! This year, homework has met with much higher approval and there is little difference between childrens enjoyment of routine weekly tasks and the longer, project pieces. Homework in general has been done accurately and to a high standard.

December 2011

Figure 3 Scores of different homework tasks

Popular and Less Popular Maths Activities


Maths has proved particularly popular in Willow so far this year.

Figure 4. Scoring of the range of maths activities

Figure 4 shows that there is very little variation in the ranking of the different aspects of our maths work. As in previous years, the weekly tests and end of unit tests prove very popular children enjoy testing and proving themselves, provided there is positive feedback and encouragement. Maths is proving very popular and children are making good progress. Even the solving of word problems (the fourth column in Figure 4) is up there on an equal footing with the others. That the children enjoy this is a step forward. Sadly enjoyment does not always translate into accurate solutions but we can work on this!

Anda mungkin juga menyukai