I was pleased then when my daughter's first experience of learning about World War II was a much richer one. For years and years, teachers have been striving to harness kinaesthetic, visual and auditory learning styles - but still too often it's chalk and talk. So for the rest of this blog over to my 9 year old who has words to say about her first (very interactive) experience of learning about WW2.
When you were evacuated and you had to go off, they chose the ones they thought would be useful. Can you imagine! It was really interesting wearing the clothes from the 1940s and realising that the children had to have their gas mask and box with them at all times. Dressing up helped us in literacy too, we had to write a first person account actually thinking like you were a person in WW2.
We did lots of making too, in DT we had to make an Anderson shelter – I had pieces of wood and sawed them into the right measurements, 14cm etc, and gluing with PVA. We put goggles on because of the sawdust. I made some bunk beds to go in my Anderson shelter with a bit of woodwork help from my dad. We also made rag rugs because they had to use old scraps of material for everything.
All the parents came in and we sang them Songs, WW2 songs, Run Rabbit Run and Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B, I saw some film of the Andrews sisters too. The parents could ask us questions about what we had learnt and we showed them our rag rugs and things we had made.
It was fun trying out being an evacuee, experiencing it yourself makes you think ‘ hang on a minute’, it’s not quite as simple as you thought, you get a bit more information, you get the feelings – when you read about it it’s not enough, when you experience it it gets you thinking a bit more. When we were doing a dance based on
listening to the air raid sirens, it made me realise that it was a horrible experience for people at the time, like a howling wail.... it was real, it's real fear, not just pretend.
Mr Gove, please take note.
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( 3 / 15 )Finland has recently been lauded as a beacon of educational excellence by all and sundry, including our Government. Finland ranked second only after Korea in a world table of OECD countries for attainment in English, Maths and Science. England was at best 13th and as low as 24th in some areas. While many other countries are progressing up the world league tables, if English education system was a football team we’d be in the relegation zone.
With cherry picking from the world’s ‘best’ education systems being part of the current curriculum review – are we really looking at Finland’s success through a smudgy lens?
Let’s look at a few of the reasons Finland does so well educationally. For starters, full time education doesn’t start until a child is seven years old, with free childcare available for all who need it. Stop and think about that for a moment… it’s a colossal difference to the way our society, schools and families are set up.
In Finland, all full time students get a free school lunch that provides 1/3rd of a child’s daily nutritional value. Jamie – imagine how chuffed you’d be if we could say the same about our school lunches? Schools in Finland are comprehensive, free, local and class sizes rarely rise above 20.
At the chalk face, Finland enjoys a very small national curriculum and teachers are trained in school by specially skilled professionals, nicely linking theory and practice on the job.
The Finnish national curriculum is not small because of some desire to remove state intervention but because teachers are trusted and respected to do their own thing where appropriate. Alas, this level of autonomy is not afforded to our teachers, either in terms of financial reward or freedom to teach what it is that works best. Why? Because education provision became the political tool of choice several decades ago and we let it happen. Result? It’s too dangerous to trust teachers to do their jobs.
Until we begin to raise the level of respect we have for our teachers - which requires the recruitment of excellent candidates who can look forward to a high salary and good working conditions - tinkering at the level of national curriculum minutiae will not change a thing – except make teachers feel even more sharply the increasing burden of change. It certainly won’t transform us into Finland.
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( 3 / 15 )Due to increased business, we are looking for new writers. If you are an experienced teacher with a desire to write refreshingly different teaching and learning resources contact h.mason@multiplelearningsolutions.co.uk
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( 2.9 / 36 )Designed for interactive white boards, MLS devised and wrote Fair Shares in response to a question children and young people often ask us, ‘When we put our money into a savings account, what happens to it?’
We were keen to produce a dynamic, interactive resource about how to invest money ethically –and indeed to explore with teenagers if such a thing was possible. Approaching the Co-operative bank to work with us on this seemed the obvious first choice. We were delighted when they said yes.
Fair Shares is a fast-paced, competitive team game based on the concept of responsible or values-based investing. Students aged 14–16 work in small teams and take on the role of investment managers with a brief to buy shares in ethical companies which they believe will also make a profit. They begin by learning what is meant by ‘ethical investment’ before selecting three fictitious but realistic companies in which to invest.
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( 3 / 45 )We are delighted that our Get Set for the Olympic Truce film was shown at the UN General Assembly in New York on 17th October!
As part of our work for London 2012, MLS worked with the film production company on the film script, designed and delivered a series of workshops for students about how the ideals of the Olympic Truce can apply to their own lives and communities and wrote a suite of teaching and learning resources to support practical, student-led activities http://getset.london2012.com/en/get-set ... mpic-truce
For the first time in Olympic history, all 193 member states have signed the Truce Resolution which aims to use the power and inspiration of sport and the Olympic Games to help build a better, more peaceful world. We’re proud to have played the tiniest part in that.
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