Linda's Meta-learning Journal

Had a long discussion with some other members of staff about behavioural issues in the school. There's a general feeling that things have got worse over the last three years. Children seem less willing to listen and it's really hard to get them to engage with a subject.
Having said that the last two days Literacy lessons in yr5 show what can happen when things go well. Yesterday we did a hotseat where I acted the part of Mwanaishia, a 23yr old mother of 6 from Kenya whose village got a water pump. The children have already read about her and other people who are still struggling with dirty water. Yesterday they got to be reporters and ask me questions that they had already prepared. It took just a few moments for them to suspend their disbelief and then they were totally there in Kenya interviewing her. They took copious notes, asked some amazingly perceptive questions and all went well with all the children who might have been a problem engrossed in what they were doing. Today they used those notes to write newspaper reports of their interviews. A selection of the lower ability groups headlines might give a clue as to the quality of the work produced.

Clean Beats Dirty in a Wet War

Magic Water Saves Lives

Water of Life for Kenyan Families

Would You Drink This?
All the children wrote at least a page and a half. They used connectives, paragraphs, expressive language, speech marks for quotes, everything we could ask of them. All of them ended their reports with some sort of appeal for water aid. At the end of the lesson one of the boys who is often an instigator of problems asked "What are we going to do about this then Miss? These people are dying!".
Luckily I was able to tell him that tomorrow we are all going use what we've learned to write letters to Gordon Brown asking him what the British Government intends doing to promote the issue of clean water.
So what made the difference? I supose it was mostly one thing, reality. The children saw real photographs of real people and accounts of real lives. Then they were able to believe in what I was telling them in my role in the hot seat. This was something they could see was important, having clean water matters.
We'll also play the Water Aid Game tomorrow and explore the rest of the site to read some more stories about real children.