Could an edubuzz blog potentially be a place where all East Lothian Parent Councils - and Parent Forum members - get involved with what’s happening across the county?
Some time ago we set up the “Parents” blog (http://edubuzz.org/blogs/parents) to support consultation on the draft Parental Involvement strategy (20 pages, pdf, 800KB).
Now that the Parent Councils are up and running, meetings are now taking place of the East Lothian Association of Parent Councils. That raised issues of communications between the individual councils.
- How do Parent Councils keep in touch with what other councils are doing?
- Where can you find links to East Lothian Parent Council web sites?
- Where can you find updates on what’s happening county-wide, such as the Association meetings?
Our current plan is to use the Parents blog as a place to share this information, and hopefully promote the integration of all parents into East Lothian’s leading networked education community. If you’d like to contribute to the site, please get in touch and we’ll help get you started.
Over at SupportForAll, the blog about support for learners in East Lothian, you can read about how a Polish parent is helping in the classroom at Musselburgh’s Burgh Primary.
She doesn’t have much English herself, but is able to read Polish from bilingual books to a pupil who doesn’t speak English.
We purchased bilingual story books and the mum read the Polish version and I was able to echo in English. When she heard the story in Polish, my P1 pupil was really excited and the rest of the class were fascinated. Now that they are a regular event the other children also enjoy these sessions and are beginning to predict what I am going to say based on what has been read and they are able to pick out some Polish words if they are repeated a lot within the story.
Primary 3/4 at Whitecraig Primary School decided that people from outside Whitecraig didn’t know anything about it, and that they would use their project to do something about it.
The children were keen for the challenge and discussed in groups how they could share information about the village. Various ideas were suggested including writing reports, taking photographs and recording their own video. Â
The children were keen for the challenge and discussed in groups how they could share information about the village. Various ideas were suggested including writing reports, taking photographs and recording their own video. Â
The result was the video which you can see over at their school site. It’s a great example of how web publishing enables what might be just a “pretend” classroom activity to be transformed into a real, relevant task, with a real audience, which really can make a difference. Why not have a look, and leave them a comment to let them know what you think?
