Education begins the gentleman

Whenever I think wistfully of not having to fill in all my university paperwork (assessment next week!) I have to remind myself that next year I'll be having to do reports at this time of year instead. We use ReportAssist at our school (note to self, email new school and find out what they do), which K let me have a play around with in our mentor meeting.

It's interesting the sort of statements that get into these things - its all very positively phrased, which is important but I was interested to see that we also put an effort grade and an attainment grade for the 3 core subjects because apparently otherwise the parents tend to just fasten onto the positive parts and not notice the issues. I suppose it's rather awkward to come out bluntly and say "He's not trying his hardest" but I feel like we don't say it because of the likelihood of the parent coming back with "Well it's your job to make him, isn't it?" And partly it is, but it's not something you can do all yourself - it's a collaboration and the child has to live up to their end of the deal too.

Also this week a couple of IEP review meetings which I sat in on. Very different parents! One very deferential Mum who I got the impression has trouble getting her son to do things like sit down and do some reading (I'm not surprised - so do we sometimes!) and mostly just wanted us to give her lots of advice and so on. The other had lots of opinions, had taken the child to see specialists and so on, kept wanting to know what his progress was like compared to the rest of the class and wanting him to have special lessons in this and that but also not to feel like he was being singled out or wasn't part of the class or anything like that. On the other hand, I have more confidence that she'll push her child to do the things we've discussed than the easy mum, so it's swings and roundabouts. Lasting impression: be very diplomatic. I guess it's just as frustrating for the parent if their child isn't making the progress that they want. Once the talkative parent had kind of talked through all her feelings about it we did get some really good targets in place for the child's next year so I think it was pretty positive but it did take a long time!

So I have now had the opportunity to do two assemblies! Last term, I took the KS1 assembly that our class teacher was down for, which was fairly straight forward. We were thinking about friendship that term and so I took in Best Friends or Not and we talked about what a best friend should do and what a best friend doesn't have to do, which worked really quite well.

This week was a different kettle of fish though - this week was our class assembly. Not only that, but as we had an inset day on Monday, I only had 3 days to prepare a class of fractious five year olds! I had talked about what the theme might be and what sort of work we might include before we'd headed off for half term on Friday and then I'd gone away and done all the lesson plans and so on. Tuesday we did the work and I selected some and wrote the script. Wednesday we did a rehersal and they took them home to learn their lines and loose them. Thursday was more practicing and trying to get in some actual non-assembly related learning as well and then today was the big day!

It actually didn't go off as badly as I though it was going to. In front of the school, the restlessness and fractiousness was kept well under control and they were much better at coming in on their cues. They did miss out a bit in the middle though, which left it rather short!

In retrospect (and if I'd had more time) I would have given each of them cards with their lines on and their cue line rather than the whole script as it would have meant less rustling. Bit trickier for those who had more than one thing to say, but overall better, I think. If it hadn't been the start of term, it would have been better to do the work one week and then use that to create an assembly that you'd rehearse next week - it would have been less rushed that way and there would have been more opportunities to create work and then get it illustrated and so on. I'm so glad that's over with now!

I can see that it's nice for the kids to get to show all their work in front of the school, but what ended up happening was that I felt like I didn't actually teach them much this week because it was all assembly work, which is not desparately exciting for them. With the best will in the world, rehersing is pretty dull when you've said your bit and you've got to wait for everyone else to have their say - they just can't do it quietly. Still, the parents seemed to like it and I guess when they're five people just like to see them get up and say something charming - doesn't have to be very sophisticated!

OK, so this is a prime example of why it is that I want to completely re-write the ICT curriculum. What the hell! Basically, if you want to talk about representing data graphically, pictograms are one of the most fiddly things to generate using ICT resources. Also, they've only just started getting the idea of representing data graphically anyway. I'm not at all convinced they're ready to take that to another level - you could get them to generate a pictogram over a couple of lessons, I doubt you can make one in ICT. Frankly you'd be much better off postponing the module until Year 4 and then teaching them to use Excel to make graphs. In the mean time we can do the Year 6 creating hyperlinks module!

ETA OK, so there is software which has been (as far as I can tell) specifically written for this module - RM Starting Graph. Which is fine, and means that you can produce a pictogram but what they get out of it is (a) what pictograms are and how they work, which is good, but it's Maths and (b) how to use RM Starting Graph, which is not a transferable skill and a total waste of their time - I stand my my plan to do it in Year 4 and teach spreadsheets to do it with.