Key Aspects at Cherry Orchard

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Key Aspects at Cherry Orchard

• Fiona Wilson
• Leadership task BASS with colleague.
• Excellence and Enjoyment - next step for us to
  focus on the Key Aspects planned a focus week
  based around a key aspect.
• Assess what the children knew about the Key
  Aspects already for a baseline to measure any
  impact.
• The results highlighted areas that the children
  knew little about.
• Spoke to SMT arranged focus week based on a Key
  Aspect.

Information regarding some of this can be found
on the Bgfl plus.
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Key Aspects definitions
Key aspect Definition
Communication To be able to speak, listen, read and write effectively for different audiences.
Creative thinking To use your imagination to think about your work.
Empathy Seeing things from another persons point of view and thinking about your response.
Enquiry Answering questions and setting your own questions.
Evaluation Think about the work that you and other people completed.
Information processing Finding information from a range of sources.
Managing feelings To understand how you feel and to think about feelings.  To stop and think before acting.
Motivation To take pride in your learning and to learn because you want to achieve a goal.
Problem solving To have strategies to solve a problem.
Reasoning To give reasons for your opinions and actions.
Self awareness To think about the choices you make and why you are making them.
Social skills Play and learn cooperatively.  Respect other children and adults.
We asked 33 chn to define these and say when they
had heard of them in school.
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Result of audit
Empathy 3/33 chn PSHE/RE/Assemblies
Motivation 5/33 Assemblies / ethos
Self awareness 7/33 PSHE / Assemblies / ethos / PE / Music
Problem solving 28/33 After focus week
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What do we do with the information?

• We then had to decide how to move forward?
• Initially our plan was quite small
• Chart with definitions to go in classrooms.
• Whole school push on Motivation, Empathy and Self
  Awareness through assemblies and general ethos.
• Staff trained and encouraged to refer to Key
  Aspects when relevant.
• A focus week planned around a key aspect every
  year.
• Staff to pick one scheme in Summer term that a
  key aspect links well with, and teach a lesson
  through a Key Aspect based objective.
• This then led to staff identifying a lesson in
  every scheme they could teach through a Key
  Aspect based Learning Objective.

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Focus Week

• At Cherry Orchard we have a Focus Week every
  term. We try to plan
• all areas of the curriculum around a common
  topic. Sometimes the
• focus is Science, Creative Arts or Black History.
• Because of our findings and analyses from QCA and
  SATs results
• indicated we could improve in areas such as
  problem solving, we
• decided this to be our focus for a week in the
  Summer term, 2006.
• As this is also a Key Aspect we could be
  addressing this as well.
• Staff were asked to base their week around a
  curriculum area they
• enjoyed or specialised in and to plan it relating
  to problem solving.
• Directed Time was allocated to plan the week in
  detail.

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Focus Week plans

• Problem Solving
• PSHE/Inclusion - Disabilities
• Life skills Plan a holiday
• Drama Dilemmas (Toy Story)
• Maths planning a birthday party
• Technology Special box
• Science - Recycling

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Life Skills Planning a holiday Y6
Maths calculating prices of hotel, flights, car
parking, getting to airport, converting money.
Given x amount to take 4 people on holiday.
Geography finding places to visit using certain
criteria.
ICT researching weather
currency flag capital
language spending money
Present to the rest of the class.
From research, plan what to take in your suitcase
and hand luggage.
Complete passport forms Post Office gave them
to us.
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Year 6 project

• The focus weeks were so exciting and stimulating,
  we decided to do something similar
• after SATs last year. We planned a project around
  the Key Aspects.
• The Year 6 children worked in groups to plan and
  deliver a set of lessons to every other class in
  the rest of the school.
• They each chose the Year group they were going to
  teach and the Key Aspect they were going to focus
  on. There are 12 Key Aspects and 12 classes, so
  each Key Aspect was covered.
• We spent 2 weeks of afternoon lessons planning
  and making resources.
• The teachers helped to plan and advised the
  children.
• The children presented their ideas to the rest of
  the year group before teaching, evaluating and
  amending their ideas.
• One afternoon, all the groups of children went
  their chosen class and taught their lesson.
• The teachers from the rest of the school
  evaluated the childrens lesson and spent time
  giving them feedback.
• The children also evaluated their own lessons and
  suggested improvements for next time.
• Not only were the children teaching the rest of
  the school about the Key Aspects, but
• they were using most of them during this project
  as well.

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Key Aspects through the curriculum

• The focus week and Year 6 project were so
  successful for us and the
• children that we decided to identify a lesson in
  each foundation scheme
• that we could teach the key aspects through. For
  example

Geography Y6 study Mountains and create a
PowerPoint presentation. The content of the
scheme was still taught, and the end product was
still the same, but one of the lessons was based
around Communication. L.O. To identify
features of good communication and use these in
our presentation.
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Where next? 18 months later

• Audit children again measure impact so far and
  identify areas to promote.
• The chart with the definitions of the Key Aspects
  on is on display in every classroom R Y6.
• We are going to continue to use our focus weeks
  or projects with Year 6 to teach the Key Aspects
  through.
• The Key Apsects was one of our School Improvement
  Priorities. We have been developing links to
  these wherever possible.
• By the end of this academic year we will have
  identified one lesson in all of our foundation
  schemes to teach through a Key Aspect based LO.
• All of our staff have had training on the Key
  Aspects over the last 18 months. The new
  curriculum we are in the process of designing
  links to them where possible and has a column
  where staff identify these links on our planning
  grids.