It looks so neat to have half-termly units of work, everyone knows what they are doing. But who are we trying to please? The last time I taught a 7 periods of spreadsheets back to back the kids nearly went on strike. And we all know if you don’t use a program for a while you forget things; and a year is a long time in Year 7. Much better to do 2 shorter units of modelling. The first one concentrating on skills and the second a project after a revision of skills.
This came up in converstion with Luke and Sally and they agreed, so we are going to trial the idea this year. In the absence of a better place to record and discuss this decision hopefully people will comment here on how they are finding this decision.
Of course there will also be a case for splitting up databases, the other unit of work that the average child doesn’t really like too much.
It would be nice to integrate spreadsheets into other units even if it just means occasional use for 10 minutes. Thats often how we use spreadsheets in real life. Or this could also be acheived by cross-curricular ICT taught in other subject classes.
