Dyslexia Friendly School

UPDATE: We have now achieved the Dyslexia Friendly School Award!  

This year we have been developing a range of strategies across school to help all children with their reading and spelling, and in particular those who have dyslexia or dyslexic traits.  All of our staff team have benefited from fantastic training delivered by North Tyneside’s Dyslexia Team and have worked hard at making sure all the strategies were in place in all classrooms.  These have included: syllabification, sound buttons, pre-teaching topic vocabulary, creating our own mnemonics and word mats, along with many other strategies.  In the pictures you will be able to see how classroom displays support this, as well as how the resources support learning in classrooms.  We have now had our assessment and are waiting to see if we can call ourselves a ‘Dyslexia Friendly School’.  Watch this space!

SOLE in Years 5 and 6

On Wednesday 7th January, Years 5 and 6 explored a whole new way of beginning a new topic- through the use of SOLE.  SOLE, as we all found out, means Self Organised Learning Environment and we were going to use this to help us ask BIG QUESTIONS about our new topic of The Vikings.  In the past we have always asked small questions at the beginning of a new topic that didn't help us find out a lot,  so something had to change!

At the beginning of the afternoon our teachers shared with us what SOLE was all about and how it could help us.  They introduced us to a very inspiring man, Sugata Mitra, who created this whole new way of learning.  We were extremely excited to have a go at setting up our own SOLE - the power was in our hands. 

We were challenged with the question - Who were the Vikings?  A very BIG QUESTION. We organised ourselves into groups and got stuck in.  We had so many choices to make and so many ideas to explore it felt a bit overwhelming at first but we soon got the hang of it.  Our Headteacher, Mrs Withers, popped in to see how we were getting on and was amazed at the different ideas and methods we had chosen to explore the BIG QUESTION.

After carrying out research, some groups chose to present their information by first writing a playscript and then acting it out.  This was all around the theme of the new words the Vikings had brought to our language.  It was brilliant!  Another group explore the theme of transport and asked themselves questions like Where did the Vikings roam?  They presented their information as a written report. 

Overall we all enjoyed taking more control of our own learning and look forward to testing our SOLE muscles again soon.