Functional skills

Re-designing the curriculum to develop childrens creativity

Aim: We wanted to know if there are generic competencies that learners need to be creative, what those learning attributes are, and whether being creative develops childrens life-long learning skills. This was so that we could focus on teaching those key life-long learning skills and change / simplify our school curriculum, adapt teaching & learning to enhance childrens creative opportunities and ignite a broader professional debate about future curriculum content.

Teaching punctuation

Aim: To identify reasons why some pupils in Year 8 have difficulty with basic punctuation, to explore teachers' perceptions of pupils' difficulty with punctuation and their pedagogic strategies for supporting pupils with punctuation problems and to suggest strategies which are likely to help pupils use punctuation successfully

Do children have similar models of understanding for seeing, hearing and smelling?

Aim: Many curricula include information about seeing, hearing and smelling, and an appreciation of these senses is related to an understanding of the behaviour of light, sound and gases. The National Curriculum for England requires sound to be taught in Year 5 and seeing to be taught in Year 6. It states that pupils should be taught that vibrations from sound sources require a medium through which to travel to the ear and that we see things only when light from them enters the eye.