KING'S OAK PRIMARY SCHOOL

Enterprise at Kings Oak!

The spring term has been as busy as last term, if not busier!
Primary One have been opening their doors and showcasing their active learning and enterprising classroom to visitors from all over Scotland.
Primary Two made and distributed pancakes to the whole school!
Now that took some careful planning! Our other primary Two have been very busy this term making a range of cards for different occasions .
Primary Three presented an excellent assembly to the whole school on the subjects of ‘My town’ and ‘Vandalism’.
Primary Four have been busy baking and learning ‘Viking’ songs as they hold an afternoon of Viking entertainment to help fund an outing to Vikingar !
Primary five have just completed their Impetus project on the very important theme of Bullying.
They summed up their project with an excellent PowerPoint presentation which they showed to the whole school at assembly.
We’ve heard the Impetus judges were very impressed, as were our school board! Rumour has it, the presentation will be distributed to other primaries as a very useful teaching and learning tool.
Primary Six held an excellent debate as part of their Europe topic.
They were visited by David Cairns who obviously gave them some debating tips!
Primary Seven organised Red Nose Day activities for the whole school and raised over £400.
Primary Seven have also been running a Fair-trade café on a Friday. Parents who wish to drop in can enjoy lovely fair-trade coffee tea or hot chocolate served by our Primary Sevens.
Our pupil council were in the news as they displayed our ‘Golden Wristbands’ which are awarded to our Golden pupils at assemblies on Fridays .
We are eagerly awaiting completion of our ‘King’s Oak Rules’ Good Conduct DVD …… coming soon to a classroom near you!!!!!

I decided to run an after school movie making club. There were 9 children in total from P5 who wanted to come to the club. We used digital blue cameras initially and made short animation films. The children worked really well in groups of 3, making their own plasticine character. We had good fun, giving the characters names and a personality.

Then a flyer came in from the Royal Meteorological Society, inviting entries for a weather report competition for primary and secondary schools throughout the UK. All schools were invited to make a movie, poster, dramatisation or powerpoint presentation; the sky was the limit!
Group sizes were to be no more than 5, but we had 9 so we decided to enter 2 groups.

Our next problem was: play it safe or take a risk. The children debated over this one for quite a while. After all, the stakes were high! The prizes were an ipod nano 2GB for each child, a laptop computer with the latest software, a digital camera and a 3 year school membership to the Royal Meteorological Society establishments for the school.

In the end, both groups chose to play it safe. However, safety just isn’t inspirational and a ‘Heather the Weather’ forecast just wasn’t cutting it, so they decided independently to use their prior knowledge of digital blue cameras and some previously cut footage to spice up their weather reports.

However, when we tried to merge the digital blue footage with the movie making software package we encountered problems. This is when we called in the expert help of Carol Ann Hannah from IBM. She was inspirational and showed us a few techniques to add polish and professionalism to our entries. The resulting movies were spectacular.

The club ran over a 12 week period; however, I took groups bi-weekly after the first 4 weeks to give them the space and quiet required to film. Each group chose their own camera person, anchor person, researcher and script writer. I was there as a facilitator, giving comments if required.

On the whole, this was a very successful enterprise. We began with little knowledge of digital blue cameras or of the movie making software package we used to edit our film, but we learned together, made mistakes, lost information and became really frustrated at times. But in the end we worked together, learned from each other and realised when it was necessary to call for help. That’s how you learn: by having a ‘can do’ attitude. The icing on the cake is gaining first prize.

King’s Oak Primary School
Lynne McGugan, Class Teacher
Enterprise in Education

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