According to this article from Guardian Education, David Tennant (actor and current star of BBC Show Doctor Who) is the ideal headteacher.

Image from www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho

Primary school children were asked to vote for the person they would most like to be in charge of their school. Some of the other choices included Barrack Obama, JK Rowling, David Beckham and Cheryl Cole. Lots of celebrities were chosen by the children ’because they were fun’.

The survey also indicated that most children felt that their own headteachers made them feel happy at school. 88% of children also believed that their headteacher wanted the best for their school. Read more results in the article.

Who would be YOUR dream headteacher? Let us know in the comments…

Mr Read has written a book about teaching.  Here’s all the details provided by Mr Read himself:

“Where to find a book about teaching by a teacher? All I could find were grim behavioural manuals that all started with ‘Getting The Buggers To…’ or alternatively the comfort read, those nostalgia fests about a village school in the 1950’s and 1960’s. ‘Miss Read’ has to deal with a grumpy caretaker and a faulty boiler, a different universe from testing, league tables and Ofsted inspections.

This book is the reality check about primary teaching in the new millennium. Read on.

There is plenty of biting humour aimed at children, parents and teachers… mainly teachers.
I’m raging, raging at the dying of the light, the light of creativity, the light of imagination and the love of learning.
We need to address this question – what the hell are they doing to our children?

Read the blog – http://mrread.blogspot.com/2009/04/i-8-skool-by-mr-read-8.html“

To round off the National Year of Reading an online campaign has been created to promote reading amongst young people. Via a YouTube channel, viewers are invited to read up on a topic and post on the channel’s wall to help Garron (the protagonist) pull off some outlandish dares.

Please see the set-up to the dare here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qlFYMyJ5BY

And the actual dare here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqvpPXOSkN0

The full campaign can be found at http://uk.youtube.com/user/garronsdares

With Halloween coming up soon use CBBC’s guide to for activities and information on why we celebrate (unless you are in a church school!) the day.  Why we use pumpkins and not turnips, why do people wear costumes, and how can we trick or treat safely.

As teachers become ever more targeted on performance, the tendency towards “teaching to test” is growing. Specifically, grooming children to pass exams is resulting in a narrowed education and the fun of learning exploration is in decline.  We need more educational games to induce interest, enjoyment and increase the band width in learning; after all, that’s what it is all about.

School days are becoming a daily grind.  The curriculum and performance targets conspire to narrow the scope of our children’s learning in preference of techniques that lead to better results. Whilst the measure of success is all that is subsequently recognised there is a downside. Bernice McCabe, head of North London collegiate school, said recently “Teachers were struggling to enhance the richness of their subjects and the sheer enjoyment of studying them.  Lessons merely provided cultural and intellectual impoverishment for pupils.”

The possibility of a sea of change in our educational system is distant.  Requiring government intervention that is both ponderous and frequently transitory, it will take a generation of children to prove or disprove any change in policy. In the meantime can parents and employers continue to watch from the sidelines?  Potentially their active involvement in the schooling process can reap dividends in the breadth of learning given to children. As parents, we want the best for our children, and as employers, we want an all round education that allows employees to think outside the box. This can only emerge if the span of education is a precursor in any examination. Teachers, in the meantime, are frustrated by the limitations in the scope of the curriculum. Urging expansion in their role, they welcome the support from greater active parental involvement in the schooling process.

Ironically modern teaching resources have come to the aid of teachers, parents and children. Classroom lessons can now be emulated back at home, using the same facilities.  Developed by educationalists they comprise of DVD’s, educational games, toys and puzzles to enrich the teaching process.  Use of these games in the classroom is often restricted due to time constraints. This is ideally where parents can supplement the process at home.

Turning maths into a game; English into a quiz and science into an investigation in school and at home can be great fun.  The interactive involvement of parents can be a supportive and highly productive way to maintain a dynamic view of a child’s progress. The child sees the parent as a proactive ally rather than a distant “do your homework” authority; and teachers welcome the move.

Pressure on teachers to hit targets to appease the inspectorate will inevitably continue to impact on the classroom. A change would involve children again being guinea pigs in the process. Yet teachers are surely the best people to suggest the ideal approach. Their skill, judgement and experience should play a greater role in enriching the learning journey.  Reinforcing the curriculum through the greater involvement of educational games helps understanding, improves attention, experimentation and the overall holistic understanding.

The child improves their understanding of the subject matter, with the support of their parents, by revising or revisiting the activity undertaken in the classroom at their own pace, not that of a crowded classroom. Parents become empowered to help their child’s development at home by working in conjunction with the teacher at the right time, rather than waiting historically for the end of term report.

This hands-on approach by parents would continue the active educational bond with their children nurtured during infancy and all too often abandoned when they go to school.

Alistair Owens  keen2learn

Alistair Owens struggled at school. He is passionate about the role parents can play to support their child’s progress at school. Modern technologies incorporated into an extensive range of educational games allow parents to rekindle the level of one to one support given when their child was an infant. The dynamic involvement of a parent helps the teacher and provides the child with a learning mentor for the duration of their schooling journey.

An exam board is to review its marking guidance after one of its top examiners gave marks for a script which contained only a two-word sexual expletive. The Times reported that Assessment and Qualifications Alliance chief examiner Peter Buckroyd gave a pupil two marks out of 27 for an English GCSE paper.

He is quoted as saying the candidate had demonstrated more skills than one “who doesn’t write anything at all”. AQA said this was not in line with its guidelines, which would be clarified. The pupil is reported to have written “**** off”, and would have had another mark for adding an exclamation point.

Mr Buckroyd is quoted by the Times as saying: “It would be wicked to give it a zero because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for – like conveying some meaning and some spelling.”

I’ve found the reason behind why NORAD track Santa each year. According to Google “it was more than half a century ago, on Christmas Eve in 1955, that a Sears Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado Springs advertised a special hotline number for kids to call Santa. What the company didn’t know at the time was that they had inadvertently misprinted the telephone number. Instead of Santa’s workshop, the phone number put kids through to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace defense of the U. S. and Canada. Worse, it wasn’t just any number at NORAD: it was the commander-in-chief’s operations hotline. In the spirit of the season, Colonel Harry Shoup, the director of operations at the time, had his staff check radar data for any indication of a sleigh making its way south from the North Pole. They found that indeed there were signs of Santa, and merrily gave the children who called an update on his location. Thus, a tradition was born, and NORAD has continued to help children track Santa on Christmas Eve ever since.”

The countdown begins December 1st on NORAD’s website, where families can find a new kid-friendly game or activity every day until December 24th. And starting at 1:00 am PST on December 24th, you’ll be able to track Santa’s trip in real time. You can download Google Earth and add the NORAD Tracks Santa iGoogle gadget to your iGoogle page anytime, but make sure to come back to noradsanta.org on December 24th to download the special Santa Tracking file for an enhanced 3D Santa-tracking experience.

Link: http://www.noradsanta.org/

Sunny days! The very first episodes of “Sesame Street” are available now but just don’t bring the children. According to a warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

The extracts below are from a post by Virginia Hefferman in the NY Times. I recommend you read the whole post – isn’t it amazing how things change!

Safety: “On the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything.”

Depression: “The chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.)”

Drugs: “Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud.”

Obesity: “As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.”

Slums: “The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer.”

You can view Sesame Street clips on You Tube. Enjoy the memories!

Here’s something that I saw on The Gadget Show which children may like in class – a flight simulator built into Google Earth.  Can they fly the plane to the capital on England, Wales and Scotland?

Download the latest version of Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/). Load up Google Earth as usual, click on the globe, and hold down CTL + ALT + A. This will bring up a dialog box allowing you to choose a plane, and a runway … and get flying!

The plane can be controlled by the keyboard, mouse or a joystick. The full controls can be found at the Google Earth website.  Once
you’ve activated it, the Flight Sim can be entered and exited through the Flight Simulator option in the TOOLS menu, allowing you to change plane and airport.

EDIT: On some PCs you to need hold down CTRL + WINDOWS + A instead of the above.

There’s a fun article by Cassandra Jardine in the Telegraph this week about the first days back at school. Here’s a few quotes from the article that I think ring true with primary teachers:

“..while some are busy making sure they have the latest fashion footwear for the occasion, others are clearly dreading the return to the classroom. ”

“The worst symptoms are to be found in those starting a new school. That, I know from experience, can take months of adjustment.”

“By half-term, the nerve-strain of too much novelty will have led to regular headaches and even requests for days off school. ”

“Sharing a playground with six-foot teenagers, finding their way around, making new friends and remembering the right books and equipment threw all of my children, even the confident ones. ”

“And each year, at just this time, I promise myself we will get into the habit of early bedtimes and early rising a week before term kicks off, so that there isn’t a panic at the last minute.

What’s funny to me is that although this article is written about children starting school somehow it just seems to ring true with teachers starting as well!