Collaborative Day across the Prep School
Monday 2nd October
Collaborative Clara (one of our bear mascots) took centre stage in assembly on Monday to launch this term’s focus on working and learning together. She reminded the pupils of important skills like respecting each other’s ideas, putting the goals of a team before their own and managing disagreements. Collaborative activities are a regular part of lessons, but were given a particular focus on Monday’s Collaborative Day, and there was a fabulous buzz around school as the pupils shared thoughts, sparked ideas off each other, solved problems and debated.
Making and building relationships is a prime area of learning in EYFS. In Nursery, they created a joint piece of art in response to different types of music – it was an ideal activity to help them learn to share a space and resources, develop empathy and to understand that others might have different opinions and thoughts to their own.
As part of their Muck, Mess and Mixtures topic, Year 2 had great fun working together to create a class potion. Kavita’s contribution was ‘alligator infested water mixed with sour, lemon jelly’. She said working with a partner helps because, ‘sometimes we get things wrong and our partner can help get things right’.
Year 4 spent a lesson teaching each other the names and functions of the different parts of a volcano. Pairs of pupils were experts of one part, at the same time they learnt from the ‘experts’ of other parts. It was impressive to see how well they adapted their explanations to support each other’s understanding.
Natalia and Esther in 4P talked about how they ‘took turns and worked together to learn new information’ and listened to each other so they learnt more.
