Using a High Quality Product from a previous project to establish success criteria

The World War One on a bike project are using the super product from last years Pathfinders project to establish a minimum quality, pick out the content and quality of the expected work and set a direction for this years students to follow. Using models or exemplars  is a clear and concrete way of doing this so that everyone understands what the project is about and what is expected.

Last years project can be found at http://hccsn.weebly.com/

Where will this project take us?

The "I just felt running project" uses two very simple but highly effective strategies to allow students to gain a sense of how the project will develop over the fortnight:

1)  'The Big picture'  - a calendar of events and learning pinned to the classroom wall and door so students know what to expect and deadlines

2)  Students create a model to represent themselves on their journey through the project. Students do this on day one and track the miles they have run throughout the fortnight, making their way to Bamburgh from Cramlington as they gain miles on their daily runs.

Cakeworld Project

Our students in CakeWorld today have been exploring some key skills of Baking 101 – making cupcakes and trialling out how to colour, roll and shape royal icing.  They’re very excited about the project of creating the Sphinx, Pyramids, Petra and Maccu Piccu.

Students have been generating some initial ideas and responses to the project (see pics) and have been creating some cupcake designs.

We have already allocated a  Star Baker award to mason who not only worked solo on the cupcakes, but was resilient at trying new skills and for someone who ‘doesn’t know how to crack an egg’, did a pretty darn impressive job!!   We have been surprised, impressed and proud of how they have all taken to Day 1 of this project…our trip to The Hancock Museum tomorrow will be an exciting adventure…we get to meet a real-life (dead hehe) mummy!

"From Freight to Furniture" Project

Students are designing and creating their own functioning furniture items in the "Freight to Furniture" project.  Some fantastic ideas taking shape already on day one....

Project Blogs

Each project has a project blog, which teachers are using to share the resources the students needed to complete the project.

This great example is from the Life as a Professional Athlete project. It has video clips, lesson resources, online specialist tools such as http://www.myfitnesspal.com/.

Fantasy Book Project - Co-construction of success criteria

In this project the students have all brought in their favourite fantasy genre book, they are sharing excepts and discussing why they like them, and  through skilful facilitation by the teacher are beginning to break down some of the writing structures and plot structures. They will then use this as a start point to negotiate success criteria for their work, an anthology of fantasy genre stories.

Group Agreement to build classroom community