Posted: Friday 14 October 2011
Assessment and the building blocks of learning
Following the School Association AGM on the Tuesday the 11th of October, Kingarth
Street hosted two very valuable workshops. Here Depute Rector Christine Haughney highlights the importance of understanding the assessment process and the building blocks of learning and shares workshop material from the evening.
Following the School Association AGM, Mrs Irene Davies, one of Hutchesons’ language teachers, spoke about our approach to the teaching of languages in the Primary. She described the progression of the curriculum and how it was not about learning colours or numbers. She spoke about our emphasis on equipping the children to realise that with a little knowledge, they can make a good attempt at getting the ‘jist’ of stories by using what they know about cognates, false friends and derivations. She spoke about building confidence, exposure to languages in the environment and providing the building blocks for the children to tackle any new language learning. Mrs Davies also demonstrated the impact that the Smartboard has on making lessons more relevant to the children. Parents who were able to attend, reported how much they had enjoyed the presentation and how much better their understanding was of what we are teaching and why.
Big Writing Workshop
‘Be the teacher’ took on a new meaning during our Big Writing workshop for parents. The purpose of the workshop was to allow parents to see how children’s writing develops and to have-a- go at assessing writing using the Big Writing Criterion Scale, developed by Ros Wilson. There was a good deal of focus and effort given to the tasks and, perhaps more importantly, very worthwhile discussions. We hope that the parents who attended, left with a good understanding of how we will be assessing children’s writing and how we identify next steps and share targets with the children. As the children become familiar with the Criterion Scale this session, we will begin to talk to them about their ‘writing level’ and this will eventually appear on Pupil Reports. The staff enjoyed sharing the activities with the parents and we were very grateful for the extremely positive feedback. Thank you to all who participated. We know that many of you were unable to attend, so we have made the Criterion Scale and the Pupil Friendly Language Criterion Scale available as pdf documents.