graham.dickie

The Apodo has arrived, much to the consternation of all pupils. P1-4 were convinced that it had something to do with their dinosaur project! My class showed equal ingenuity when asked what creature it reminded them of. What flower it looked like was harder. Which member of staff it most resembled was clearly pushing it!

So, what to do first? I decided to use it to begin to formally introduce Curriculum For Excellence capacities to the class. These had been mentioned, and a school display has been created by the HT at the school entrance, but I had been waiting till January for the class ‘launch’.
The class were shown a version of the Successful Learners criteria that I’d developed (in more child friendly language) and, in groups, were asked if they had fulfilled any of them yesterday. They were then asked to nominate people who they thought were successful according to the criteria.

After a vote, the pupil deemed to have shown themselves to be a successful learner was duly awarded the Oscar from the Oscar Pod. This comes suitably engraved with a quote about success, “Success comes in cans, not cannots.”
There was content rich discussion. It didn’t take too long. And we will be able to choose another learner tomorrow with everybody becoming more familiar and focus on this capacity.
As we professionals say… it worked!
And we’ve got three more weeks to play with the pod!