I've been working with Mim and her class to help her to develop the use of philosophy with her children.  We met up this week to talk about how she was getting on and talk about her next steps.  Would highly recommend taking a morning out to go somewhere that ISN'T a school to inspire you!  We talked about how much her children enjoyed and got out of the philosophy session, and then started to talk about how she wanted to use drama next term to do a project on dracula.  We've had some goop ideas.  Will post them here and hopefully anyone who is inspired can add to them!

To begin at the beginning . . .

It's probably worth thinking about how active membership of the Norfolk ASTs Learning Community might enhance the work of ASTs.  Seb Gasse has written a blog here in which he reports on the presentation he gave to ASTs introducing blogging.  He has put his PPt presentation in his File Storage.  But I think it might be worth putting a bit of flesh on the bone.  In the AST Network File Storage (use the link on the right of this page or click here: E Networking ) is the PowerPoint presentation that I gave to delegates to the Norfolk E-Learning launch in early November.  It's quite theoretical, but you might be interested. If you're not, ignore it by all means.  After all, one of the beauties of this technology is that you don't have to follow the links!  On the other hand, if following up some background reading about social constructivism is appealing, you might like to look at my del.icio.us links here.

 The point is that this really is a Learning Network.  The active participant should learn more effectively as a result of using the network.  And by active participant I really mean someone who not only reads and comments on other peoples' postings, but who posts themselves.  We're probably all familiar with the teachers' truism that you never really understand something until you've taught it.  Well I think it's the same in this context: you never really undertand what you're doing until you've blogged it!

 More musings to follow.

I took the first qualifcation for Forest Schools this year and have begun to develop areas for outdoor play for Foundation and Key Stage 1 Children. Our school is situated in a rural location in 'The Broads' and beacuse of this we are developing wider links within the community.

My school is envolved in the creation of an innovative curriculum where all subjects are integrated. This is a new exciting and challenging area which I have implemented in my teaching during the Autumn Term 2006.

Thanks all for sharing ideas today.  I really enjoyed it.

This is the very first time that I have done this! With support of friends I will learn alot.

I am new to blogging and I hope to communicate and learn from others.  I am interested to learn more about coaching and N.L P.in schools.  I would also like to share ideas for good practice in Reception Class.

As I am new to this blogging lark, I decided I needed a friend so I clicked on the picture of a former colleague and fellow AST Cyril. As I clicked on the add him as a friend I got the response "are you sure you want to add this person to your list of friends?" (or words to that effect). Well after brief consideration - yes, Cyril , I do!

I was getting rather fed up with the fact that my Y10 & Y11 classes didn't seem to be learning enough. I tried all my usual tricks of reinforcing vocabulary through games and flashy powerpoint activities and ok, it was fun but.... So somewhat depressed and worn out after hours inventing new games and worksheets i returned to the traditional "talk and chalk" method of teaching grammar including words like "nominative and accusative case" and subject, verb, direct object. At the end of the lesson I asked for feedback on the method and how much they felt they had learnt. 96% of students said they prefered the approach and felt they understood more. Of course only time will tell, but one thing i did notice was that an intelligent but extremely lazy boy, who never usually puts pen to paper, wrote everything down and actually did more than anyone else! So my conclusion... Don't forget the old ways. Use both approaches. We assume powerpoint and games appeal to the boys - well they do - but they also like the good old stand and at the front and shout at them approach.