December 2010

Ginkgo’s Review of the year so far!

As in other years Mr Cornish once asked the whole class to look back over all their work
since the start of year in September 2010 and draw up a list of all the things we had done in
that time. It was fun to do and we came up with a list of 96 activities. (We listed 84 activities
this time last year). Again, it was surprising and satisfying to see just how many things we
had done since the start of the year.

Once we were happy with our list Mr Cornish produced a simple checklist that allowed us to
score every activity on a scale between 0 and 6, where 0 = ‘Very bad’ and 6 = ‘Really good’.
It looked like this:

Name Very Really

Bad Good
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Art Sunset Pictures
Drawing an apple
Shading and 3D shapes
Drawing in the style of Quentin Blake
Art in superhero comics
Henna hand art
Calendar art
Pointillism
Experimenting with circles
DT Making onion soup
Making star from sticks
Making an oil lamp
English Letter to Mr Cornish about summer holiday
Poems on light and dark

Figure 1 - Top section of the scoring sheet we used to rank our activities

By adding up everyone’s score for a particular activity we could get a rough indication of
how stimulating, interesting and satisfying the different activities had been. Two people
were away on the day we did this so we had 23 score sheets. The maximum number of
points any activity could get was therefore 23 x 6 = 138. These are a few of the things we
found out.

Top 20 Activities

The top 20 contains activities from across the curriculum but it is notable that the children
ranked art and creative activities linked with music very highly. Nine of the top 20 are based
around either art (shaded green) or music (shaded blue). The top scorer combined these
two by asking the children to listen to the song ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ before
discussing its meaning and the sentiments expressed and then creating a drawing based on
some of those ideas.

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 December 2010

It is pleasing to see both maths (shaded yellow) and reading activities listed in the overall top
20; and a homework project was ranked 6th overall! Even the most popular writing activity,
in which children wrote their own version of the story of Rama and Sita, only achieved 36th
position.
(Note to self: work harder at making writing enjoyable.)

Rank Activity Score

(% of 138)
1 Yr 3 Bridge Over Troubled Water art work 86
2 PE apparatus at work 86
3 Class story – Shadow by M Morpurgo 78
4 Estimating Smarties in the jar 78
5 Making an oil lamp 75
6 Homework – Meaning of Christmas project 75
7 Pantomime – Beauty and the Beast 75
8 BBC typing mat 75
9 Guess the picture 75
10 Art in superhero comics 74
11 Henna hand art 74
12 Quiet reading 74
13 Yr 3 Listening to Holst’s Planet Music 71
14 Weekly tables test 71
15 Calendar art 70
16 Art – Experimenting with circles 70
17 Yr 3 Composing music of sunrise/sunset 68
18 Drawing in the style of Quentin Blake 68
19 Swimming 67
20 Number bonds to 100 67

Table 1 – Top 20 Activities

It is striking that a simple activity such as estimating the number of Smarties in a jar, an
activity prompted by the theme of “spots” on Children in Need day, received a higher overall
score than the trip to the pantomime! But let us not get drawn into the statistical
significance of 3 percentage points in an exercise such as this!

The Class Story

As in earlier years, listening to a story being read is a firm favourite. The Michael Morpurgo
story, ‘Shadow’, based around the experiences of a mother and her son, who are Afghan
refugees, comes towards the very top of our list. Interestingly, the reading of short
traditional tales by Hans Christian Andersen did not generate such a positive response.

(Note to self: Don’t let the class story get squeezed out by other things.)

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 December 2010

The Bottom Five Activities

Rank Activity Score (% of 138)

95 Writing a report on visit to Hindu temple 36
96 Understanding day and night and what makes seasons 34
97 Discussing the story of the Samaritan 34
98 Violins for Yr 4 32
99 Comprehension task during reading workshop 30

Like the most popular activities, the least favoured are spread across the curriculum, coming
from writing, science, RE, music and reading comprehension. Something has to come at the
bottom of the heap and I take encouragement in concluding that there is no one part of the
curriculum that has been repeatedly badly addressed.

Best homework tasks

We didn’t list every single homework activity, just the two projects and the routine weekly
themes of maths and a word or spelling investigation. Being homework we might have
expected these activities to be poorly rated but this was not the case. Figure 2 shows how
the homework tasks were rated.

80
70
60
% of possible score

50
40
30
20
10
0
Fair Trade

Maths focus
Meaning of Xmas

Spelling Punctuation

Figure 2- Scores of different types of homework

There is clearly a wide range of reaction to the different types of homework and once again
the longer projects are scored more favourably by the children than the weekly routine
tasks, with the work on Christmas falling high in the overall top 20 activities. Project work
continues to lead to a large number of high quality pieces of work being produced.

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 December 2010

Obviously, this is generated with varying degrees of parental/carer support. I have no

problem with this as I see one of the purposes of such work being to provide opportunity for
children to interact with their parents or carers and work jointly with them to achieve a
satisfying outcome. Thank you to all of you who have supported your children sensibly in
completing the various homework tasks over the last two terms.

(Note to self: Continue to set “project homework” that runs over several weeks, alongside the
necessary, reinforcing weekly tasks.)

Popular and ‘Less Popular’ Maths Activities

Amongst the different maths activities that we listed and scored it was very interesting to
see what was popular. Figure 3 shows the scores as percentages of the maximum possible.

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%
Estimating Smarties in the jar
Weekly tables test
Number bonds to 100
Halving and doubling
Negative numbers and reading scales
Venn Diagrams
2D and 3D shape
Fractions
End of unit tests
Decimals
Telling the time
Estimating and measuring lengths
Coordinates and position
Follow me games
Units of measurement

Graphs of how we travel to school

Collecting data on how we travel to school

Symmetry in shapes

Reading scales

Solving word problems

Figure 3 - Scoring of the range of maths activities

Leaving aside the one-off activity of estimating the number of Smarties in a jar, the weekly
tables and maths challenge test is ranked as the most popular maths activity, scoring
‘significantly’ more than the bulk of other maths activities. The end of unit tests fall in the
middle of the range of scores – they are certainly not disliked by the majority of children. As
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 December 2010

I concluded last year, it remains the case that for the majority of children, a well formulated
test, that is both challenging and fun, can be something to be enjoyed rather than hated.
While most of the maths activities have attracted a very similar overall rating or score, the
perennial weak spot of solving word problems sits low in the rankings. No surprise here, just
a spur to keep working on this skill!

(Notes to self: 1. Make testing fun and give children an achievable challenge; 2. keep working
on helping children interpret questions and apply the maths they know.)

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