Richard Wilson

 I have the pleasure to head up a Musselburgh Cluster project about money. All of the Musselburgh schools will be delivering the money outcomes from a Curriculum for Excellence at the same time and publishing the body of work for all to see at http://musselburghclustermaths.wikispaces.com/

The work will encompass all stages from Nursery to S3 at Musselburgh Grammar School. The project has a variety of purposes. We will have exemplars of planning formats, suggested lines of development for teaching staff, ways of assessing and tracking pupil work and publishing pupil work in a variety of formats. It will be very interesting to see a complete body of work across the schools that shows the progression as pupils move through nursery to secondary and how their grasp of money is developed. 

I have, however, one problem. The group are trying to find a Virtual Bank where pupils can set up bank accounts/credit cards, make purchases and keep an on-line account safely. I have had a quick search through a variety of search engines and can’t find one. Any ideas or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

I heard the term casual pets for the first time on radio yesterday. It refers to any creature you feed in your garden such as birds, hedgehogs etc. Here at Pinkie we are blessed with a huge enclosed playing area that is refuge to many birds I would like to think of as our casual pets. Yesterday I counted in excess of 50 curlews and as many oyster catchers working our playing fields for worms, leatherjackets and any other small invertebrates. We have some noisy visitors over from Scandinavia who are steadily denuding our rowan trees of their berries and also working the fields, these fieldfares are fascinating in their behaviour, they seem to claim a tree and squabble like mad with their mates over the berries. But our pride of place must go to our resident hen harriers, we have a breeding pair somewhere on our premises who make spectacular watching. The male is a pale grey colour, the female, who is larger, is browny with a barred tail. During breeding the male provides the meals, he calls to her as he nears the nest, she leaves and pursues him, turns updside down in mid-flight and grabs the vole/bird as she flies underneath him. During the winter months she ambushes our feral pigeons as they leave our doocot and devours them alive. Who needs the Serengeti when you have this stuff right on your doorstep! In addition, we have visiting roe deer and foxes, who lie up in our bramble patches and help keep our rabbits in control.

Dear Santa,

I’m a very uncomplicated soul whose needs are simple, I like any whisky with a cork, a light hearted book, and if anyone feel really generous a new motorbike, but, mostly, a quiet stroll along a deserted beach then back to the requests of course!

In Pinkie we have a working group looking at all aspects of reading and trying to come up with ways of improving reading skills across the whole school. I have just received an inspection copy of a resource called Read Write Inc that re-introduces the pupils to synthetic phonics, which are widely recognised as being a crucial component of learning how to read. The link takes you to the 5-14 Special Focus page on LT Scotland website. If you haven’t been there before it is well worth a look. Part of the discussion we started was to look at current school resources and to try to enhance our provision by making better use of existing materials and re-discovering ways of teaching reading better and improving our level of pace. The catch 22 situation here is neatly summed up by a quote from William Glasser, “The faster you go, the more students you leave behind. It doesn’t matter how much or how fast you teach. The true measure is how much students have learned. “

Read write inc. stresses the importance of partner work to improve learning, very much formative assessment techiques, the emphasis being:

We Learn: (William Glasser)

• 10% of what we read
• 20% of what we see
• 30% of what we hear
• 50% of what we see and hear
• 70% of what we discuss with another person
• 85% of what we experience personally
• 95% of what we teach

By working together, pupils are taught to teach and support each other to read, comprehend, spell and write their own compositions which will then be able to be published on our collaborative writing wiki.

If we adopt this system I will keep a log of its use and how it impacts on our reading here.

Ending with another Glasser quote, “Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is”.

Says it all.

The above cartoon was quickly and easily created using a super free on-line cartoon maker called Toondoo. There are loads of backgrounds, characters, and a text tool among many other features. There is also a safe search option which is useful. I will be using this with the pupils in school to stimulate their interest in writing. The cartoon can be saved as a png file which is easy to insert in your blog or web pages. Thanks to Rajendran for pointing me in the right direction. Registration is quick and easy, try it out.

As part of our Healthy Schools programme we have been promoting the Walk to School Week. As many staff, pupils and parents as possible made the effort to walk to school all week instead of cars, buses and on occassion taxi. As a special effort we had three walking buses organised to walk to school along safe routes. In the past the school averaged about 80 pupils or so who took part. This time we had a fantastic response where 210 pupils, parents and staff walked from the assembly points to school. A great way to start the day!

Kisimul Castle         Castlebay and the excellent Kisimul Cafe

Holidays this year were spent in Barra thanks to Angus MacRury, a native and ex Head Teacher of Eoligarry Primary School at the other end of Barra Airport. We had a fabulous time in and around the island. If you haven’t visited, get it on your list of places to go it is a bit special. The scallop pakora in the Kisimul Cafe is a very rare and beautiful thing, I can still taste it yet, fantastic.

The beaches are absolutely stunning and my three wee boys had a ball and here they are as the Barra Beach Boys in an Animoto movie. This free programme makes slideshows more interesting and creative. I hope to use it more in school when our new website is up an running.

Another free website that is worth a look is Musicshake. This is like an on-line version of Apple’s terrific Garageband which is a cruelly underused resource in schools. You need Internet Explorer 7 to make it work properly but they are working on adapting it for other browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari soon.

 This piece of calligraphy was presented to the school  by our Japanese visitors from the area around Osaka. It was written by Toshiyuki Tsuchiya and represents a prayer for happiness and longevity. It will take pride of place at the front of the school.

 Toshiyuki is fourth from the left in the picture and is a senior education official from the Nara Prefecture. The visitors were particularly interested in the development of career opportunities in the curriculum and how Scottish schools run. They found their visit to Pinkie very interesting and asked many questions about our education system. Like all first time visitors to Pinkie they were impressed by the ethos of the school asd particularly the huge asset that is our playing fields. It is always interesting to have visitors as it makes you reflect on what you are trying to achieve in your field. I also took the opportunity to bang on my favourite drum and asked about Japanese boys and literacy. Guess what! It’s the same in Japan as here, a tail off of achievement from early in the primary through to secondary. I feel an action research field trip coming on, let me examine my budget figures………….

Harris, Nasal Engineer, First Class.

I had occassion to visit the Edinburgh Sick Kids’ Hospital recently with my son Harris and increased my knowledge of medical procedures as a result! I was leaving school to buy some equipment and received a distressing call from my wife to say that she was on the way to the Sick Kids’ with Harris and could I get there asap. It turned out that he was experimenting with the properties and uses of Blue Tack and discovered that if he made a small ball it fitted perfectly up his nose. He further experimented as to just far he could push it up and discovered the limit was the length of his index finger. Sadly, this put the Blue Tack past the point of no return, just above the nasal bridge. It was blue and it was tacky and most definitely stuck. If you looked hard you could just make out the faint blueness of the expertly positioned object. My son does nothing by half measures. Well and truly stuck. Initially, hospital was fine due to the distractions of a variety of toys, and anyway, boys can function with one nostril perfectly well when it suits them. The panic started when reality bit in the form of a doctor and a nurse who wanted to admire his nasal engineering. Not fun, not playing! Seemingly, one good way to get the passages unblocked is the Parent’s Kiss. My wife kindly volunteered me for the procedure. This involves covering the child’s mouth with your own and blowing as hard as you can. This dislodges the blockage and other unmentionables down the child’s nose onto your chin. I did this four times, much to his amusement, and only managed to dislodge it a wee bit. He then had to be held down until the doctor could insert a big metal hook and pull the blue tack out. This is where my Team Teach training came to the rescue as I could hold Harris firmly, without distress, in a wrap until the doctor did his bit. So, thank you Harris and Bostik for allowing me to discover the amazing world of adhesives and sealants and their numerous applications and discovering the alternative Parent’s Kiss, which, by the way he found highly amusing!

Musselburgh High Street

I haven’t been keeping up with my blog of late for a host of reasons but I’m back. Back to my old home town, back to my old stamping ground and my old primary school. I have been the ‘New’ head here at Pinkie St Peter’s since the 8th of May. It’s strange to be back as Head Teacher as I was once a pupil here. It was strange to enter some of the classrooms, definite ghosts from the past! It’s a delight to be here. Pinkie was famous for its lack of speed but we now have a 10mb connection so all excuses for not keeping up to date are redundant. One of my first major tasks is to prepare an HMIE follow through report on the progress of our Action Plan. I am gathering in as much evidence as possible. Earlier on I did an analysis of our assessments and found, to no great surprise, a distinct difference between boys attainment and that achieved by girls. There is a clear difference in the levels of attainment. Now finding the whys and wherefores is my next task.

pinkie-attainment-data.xls

This very raw data shows that there is clearly something going on with the boys that needs to be investigated. This is not a unique Pinkie problem as this type of drift is something I have seen before in other schools. I am going to establish a pattern of assessment here to give me a base line on reading attainment using the Suffolk Reading Scale to measure progress over a year from Primary 3 to Primary 7. I’ll use my blog here to record my findings. At the same time I will audit all reading resources/practices here to see the best way forward. I am also constructing a new school web-site. Still in its infancy but to be put on-line soon.