I’ve mentioned a few times on twitter the changes that we are making in our school to the structure of our mornings, and a few people were intrigued, so thought I would blog about it in a bit more detail and also share my thoughts about it all.
Before.
Last year, we structured our morning, in what I’m guessing is a fairly ‘standard’ way. We had registration/early morning work, assembly and then an hour of maths, an hour of literacy and an hour of either ICT, RE, PE, Games, MFL etc…. In the afternoon we mainly had our theme work, which was , in theory anyway, cross curricular. (most our PE, RE, ICT was delivered in the morning, which usually formed part of PPA (which annoyingly was split into 1 hour chunks) . This worked ‘ok’ but it was often difficult to fit things like guided reading, interventions etc in- especially those which work best with TA support (we only employ general TA’s in the AM) as I was often only with my class for 2 hours each AM,
Next year.
Next year, we have decided to make a fairly substantial change across the school. Our day will now look something like this. (obviously with break, lunch etc)
- Registration, Early Morning work and assembly.
- Then an hour and a bit that is currently being called ‘carousel’- which is going to be made up of 20 minutes guided reading (meaning we can hopefully have each group ‘doing’ guided reading with an adult twice a week), 20 minutes of phonics/spelling/handwriting and 20 mins of calculations. I think this could work really well (but more on that below) – but am determined to give it a more ‘catchy’’ name!
- 40 minutes of ‘writing for a purpose’- where we will do what would be in an ‘English’ lesson, but the the overriding emphasis that the children must have a purpose for the writing we are working towards etc. This will be themed into our theme as much as possible, with the aim that in the future these will just become ‘theme’ lessons.
- 40 minutes of ‘real life maths/ problem solving’- with the aim being to focus on the application of maths skills (which will be taught/re-capped in the calculations part of the carousel’)- again themed in if possible.
- 15 minutes dedicated ‘class novel’ time.
- Our afternoons will then be largely devoted to ‘theme’. Our PPA has been moved to an afternoon block, as has all of the KS2 PE/Games teaching, KS2 MFL and KS2 RE (when it’s not able to be part of the theme).
My thoughts.
Overall, I;m quite ‘excited’ by all of the changes and the new structure to our school day. I think it will give us a great structure to ensure the ‘basics’ are covered which should hopefully lead to an increase in the achievement, and importantly the children’s confidence in ‘maths’ and ‘English’. We are also moving to teaching most things in mixed-ability groups which again, I’m really pleased about.
I’m also pleased as it means that we are moving even further towards a fully thematic and cross curricular curriculum- which is how I really believe we should be teaching. It means that our ICT is going to be fully integrated (in theory anyway!) along with science (which we have just re-planned cross school to ensure a good tie-in with the themes in each year group), and that our ‘writing for a purpose’ should be largely themed as well.
But the flip side of this does mean that the time we had for what was in our ‘theme’ is reduced, especially when our PPA, PE etc is taken out of it. Our theme time, without ICT (which will be integrated), music (again, will integrate that throughout the year) is going to only be 6 hours (2 full afternoons, 2 half afternoons) so I think we need to be really ‘tight’ on what we cover in the theme and ensure we get the magic ‘coverage’ we need.
The morning carousel will certainly be different- but in a good way I hope! It’s going to be a learning curve for me, especially with a focus on phonics based teaching (my phonics knowledge is low at the moment!). Its great to have class novel time and I love the idea of dedicated calculations, which will ensure that the key calculation skills are constantly refreshed, used and enhanced.
This leads me onto our ‘real life maths/problem solving’- which, again, on the face of it I’m really ‘up for’- I did weekly problem solving last year which the children loved, and of course tried to get as much as my maths as possible to be contextual + ‘real life’- however this certainly wasn’t the case for all areas of maths last year.
But this year, I’m determined to make everything fit really into the ‘real life’ and ‘problem solving’ ‘brand’’. But am unsure of how to do it for every area. I don’t want to fall into the ‘trap’ which people have already suggested in school of ‘just adding £, cm, m to questions’- as that surely isn’t ‘real life’! Things, for instance, like place value, partitioning etc seem more difficult to give a meaningful context to (addition etc, fractions, percentages etc are seem ‘straight forward’ to develop real life contexts for). If you have any suggestions/resources/ideas for helping to develop the contextual/real life maths I’d love to hear them.
So there are certainly ‘changes afoot’ – I look forward to updating you on how they ‘progress’!
TH
I would say that for partitioning and place value, that they are often used in mental calculations, with the aim of doing them quickly. I’m sure you can think of times when you need to add quickly and use those skills to help you.
Interesting. I need to think more about this! A few first thoughts/questions:
By calculations are we just talking the four operations or percentages, fractions, etc?
When do things like data handling, shape and space, co-ordinates, probability etc come into it?
What are the children who aren’t guided reading going to be doing?
And where will you be teaching literacy skills – the text immersion and analysis, sentence level skills etc you teach before they apply it in their own writing?
The structure of the timetable seems to make a huge difference to the feel of the day and the learning that takes place. I know this has been a big change to how I have felt things are working in the schools I have taught at. It is interesting to see how you are splitting things up at your school. An interesting choice to split up the skills and the applying elements of certain subjects. In some ways this seems contradictory to your aims of a cross curricular approach, in some ways this focus on skills could be a great support for it.
As Nikki raised, will you be having a focus on specific texts as a whole class for Literacy, or will all of the reading work happen in guided reading? ‘Writing for a purpose’ sounds great, but I wonder how well it can work when removed from the actual context of a theme or project and placed in a separate place like that. It will be interesting to see how you use this, I can see a danger of just coming up with a long series of un related ‘pseudo purposes’ for the children to write to which don’t actually have much relevance for them. For instance the dreaded “A hypothetical supermarket is going to be built in the local park…” letter… This is of course the worst case scenario, and your aims to integrate it into the theme eventually sound great.
Please keep us posted as to how this develops.
Look forward to seeing how this develops; as the previous comments say, will be interesting to see how sentence level/handwriting are built in. Sounds like a challenge . Calculations part sounds very exciting and will almost certainly raise attainment; real life maths is always tricky – not for shape/space/data of course, but fractions and decimals more of a conundrum.
I am sure that you will be successful in whatever approach is followed. With curriculum changes in the pipeline there are interesting times ahead.
Look forward to hearing how this all goes, could you please keep us up to date with the developments on the new structure. It look to be set out so much better, and with a good variety of work to keep the students on their toes!