Pie+Corbett

Pie Corbett stuff will appear here.

Two really good ideas my school got from a Pie Corbett course were:

1) Marking symbols for children's work. In my school, as a staff we all had input to what these should be & each year/phase added one or two more. Children know, right the way through the school that ' **p** ' on a line means there's a problem with punctuation in that line, or say, a broken line under a word like 'said' means they should try to find a better word. The only learning curve for the children is to learn the one or two new symbols used in their new year group at the start of the year. It prevents a lot of potential confusion which can happen when everyone uses a different symbol for the same thing! Interestingly, it also cuts down on marking because it's so much quicker to use a symbol than to write the whole thing out. We also found that children were using these symbols themselves to edit their work & their partner's work. We just have to remind them that if in SATs they've forgotten to put in a paragraph, they can't use **//** (our symbol for put in a paragraph) instead. We try to review the symbols from time to time to see whether they're working well or whether we need a new one for something that's cropping up quite often.

2) Poetry - On the course, Pie quite rightly made the point that we get so many language skills through poetry. So we start each academic year with a poetry unit for the term & every year group does this. We see it as our 'language toolkit' I suppose.


 * ~Sal26**

http://www.innovation-unit.co.uk/education-experience/project-archive/the-story-making-project.html The Story Making Project