Next week I will teach the last lesson in this unit. In the spirit of trying to make it better next year, here are my comments.
This is a 8 hour project split into the production of a poster for children and a leaflet for adults. There should be 1) skills & design development, 2) Internet research and writing and 3) evaluation and improvement (systems life cycle) plus some ICT and society. I weighted these 3 criteria evenly.
Authenticity
Recycling is such a great context that it seems a pity that this project is not more closely linked with work done in Science and Humanities (Life skills), and there must someone responsible for making the school more environmentally sound.
There could be a real competition for the child’s poster and links with a primary school (poster is supposedly targetted at Y3/4s).
Starters
There were very few starters available. I made a wordsearch and a bingo to strengthen vocabulary. Some videos showing TV adverts for children and adults would be nice.
Homeworks
Audience (Adults vs. Children) is righttfully a major theme of the unit occupying lots of homework. However, maybe more could have been done to improve children’s knowledge of recycling through the homeworks.
Assessment
I tried to consolidate different assesment sheets into my familiar assessment sheet style across 3 dimensions (mentioned above):
- skills & design development,
- (Internet) research and writing and
- evaluation and improvement (systems life cycle) plus some ICT and society.
Download it here:
KS3 Assessment Criteria v1.doc
Practicalities
The documentation was not clear on the activities and sequencing. This was tricky as the project is complicated with 5 deliverables for both the poster AND the leaflet. Add a review and thats 11 deliverables – difficult for lower ability Y8.
In fact for my low ability group I failed to get any reasonable research out of them at all. Of course say what you will, the kids will judge themselves on their poster and their leaflet.
Annotating first drafts will take care of 2 homeworks. However it is a fact of life that kids will wait until the end of the lesson to print a first draft and unusually slow printers made the execution of annotation homeworks difficult.
I would really like to know from other teachers what kind of sequences worked. eg. Make them hand in some research before being allowed to using Publisher.
George made some good support sheets. I saw Paul teach the begining of one lesson using one with some questions on sources and design decisions and then they had to sketch on the back before being allowed on the computer.
As always I hope collegues will feel free to add their comments below.
Posted by richard 