I've got a £60,000 car out there and I can't read

So I desperately tried to make the most of this PDP lecture on Meeting Individual Learning Needs - Reading and Writing; after I'd got over the fact that a headteacher couldn't open a powerpoint presentation, or in fact any document at all, there were a lot of things that provoked some thought.

Displays

• avoid putting up long pieces of students' writing as other pupils are unlikely to read it
• replace with brightly coloured posters so when students' attention drifts it is likely to fall on something useful

Mazes

We were given a set of 'maze clues' with which to navigate which focussed on the story of Romeo and Juliet. I've tried to find a way to incorporate this into maths; a draft attempt can be found on this website, focussing on a cake problem to be solved using simultaneous equations. I liked the way in which it was suggested that tasks could be approached from multiple angles and so have tried to use this idea in solving the cake problem.

Speed Writing

Apparently one of the hardest things to do is to generate text; once we have something on paper it is easy to go back and improve it. Hence another task was to start with the sentence "what makes writing difficult to me..." after which we had 2 minutes to write. If anyone stopped writing, we had to start the timer again (though this didn't happen). The idea of this is that pupils don't get hung up on whether the sentence is the best they could possibly write, or whether things are spelt perfectly, but that they follow Nike's slogan and

"Just Do It"

I'm not sure yet how this might be useful in maths, but perhaps as a mini-plenary, starting with "Today in maths I ..." and seeing what they write about in 1 minute. To make them more confident it might be best to do it anonymously. It could even be done as a snowball activity...

Japanese Writing

One of the activities we did was to copy down some japanese writing. Here I found myself to be copying it down bit by bit, rather similarly to the way that a dyslexic student whom I had a shadowed was doing during a science lesson - copying words down letter by letter rather than as chunked words. The text can be found here.

And finally, it was noted that parents can have a big impact. The speaker reflected on a time when she had called in a parent to discuss their child's attendance at school. The parent asked the speaker what type of car she had, to which she proudly replied "Audi A3." The parent retorted

"well I've got a £60,000 car out there and I can't read"

So not much motivation for the child to go to school coming from there then!


Slides from this lecture are split between OUTSTANDING READING AND WRITING and READING AND WRITING