Australia
So we just reached the end of our cross-curricular project on Australia… it’s been hectic and very, very hard work, but the reason we’re doing it was brought home to me this week.
The idea of introducing a project based curriculum was basically to improve enjoyment of the curriculum, give the children something to get excited about, but mainly to improve writing standards. From the very start I could see that the children were enjoying the work we were doing, and were totally engrossed in the subject, but I wasn’t 100% sure I’d see a noticeable improvement in writing over the six weeks.
To be fair, I haven’t seen an improvement from every child, but…
I went on a course on Thursday afternoon last week and left the supply some Australia work to do with the class. I wanted the children to write down what they had learned about Australia over the course of the topic. I asked her to briefly talk about grouping similar ideas into paragraphs with the children. Half of my class have been working on paragraphs since Christmas and I wanted this to be a reminder to them. The other half are low ability and haven’t covered paragraphs before - a fair few of them are still struggling with the idea of sentences.
When I looked at their work on Friday the one on top was one of my SEN children’s. This year is the second year I have taught him and when he came to me last year his writing was barely readable. His spelling was poor, his handwriting was poor and he couldn’t write in sentences. This particular child wrote me three A4 pages about Australia, in sentences that began with capital letters and ended with full stops, in logical paragraphs, with most of the high frequency words spelt correctly.
His writing has been improving for a while but this truly was the best writing he’s ever done for me and I was so proud. It really brought it home to me that if you give children the knowledge and ideas to write about that it really can come together.
I was so proud!