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PREP ACROSS THE SCHOOL

Preparatory French The new school year started positively for pupils studying French, and moved towards a very festive culmination in which they made Christmas decorations which practised their vocabulary and recognised a term of hard work and great effort. Year 3 began their French studies with much energy and enthusiasm. They have learnt how to greet people and count to 31, and have used this to say when their birthdays are. They had a creative few lessons learning colours and studying some Matisse artwork, which concluded with the creation and description of their own masterpieces in the style of the artist. The children have also begun to use the French alphabet and are also becoming more confident at following classroom commands in French. At Pok Fu Lam, Year 4 started the year by recapping colours and clothes and then performed and filmed some brilliant fashion shows showcasing this language. On both campuses, children have spent time studying food and snacks, working hard to develop their vocabulary and provide opinions on different foods and drinks. They used this to create role-plays based in restaurants. At Kowloon Bay, students then moved on to describing the rooms in their house and creating their ideal homes, including a description of their bedrooms. In Pok Fu Lam, the children developed descriptive vocabulary to do with the countryside and developed their dictionary skills within this context. Year 5 began the school year by learning to tell the time as well as developing vocabulary within the context of school subjects, and how to give their opinions on them. They spent

a lot of time learning and practising how to work with verbs in the present tense, using this to describe what is happening and giving a greater understanding of the building blocks of the French language. Year 6 have been studying the topics of Time and School. They have given their opinions on subjects and have talked about their daily routines, including times and activities. In Kowloon Bay, students also learnt the rooms in the school and conducted tours of the prep school in French for Senior School language teachers! At Pok Fu Lam, they produced some beautiful display work which highlighted their writing skills on this topic. Well done to all on a great term’s work!

PREPARATORY

ict The Challenge of Coding Coding, or Programming, or Control, have always been part of the curriculum of schools in Wales, and indeed at Kellett from the turn of the century. The new curriculum certainly puts Coding in a prominent position (it takes up the first few bullet points!), but it’s important to remember that it is still only a part of the the overall Computing Curriculum. The challenge is to ensure that students continue to gain experience of the other 21st century skills and behaviours that they will require as they continue to learn and develop. Information, visual, digital and media literacies are key areas that we need to expose our students to if they are to be truly literate in the 21st century. At the beginning of the term teachers, as well as many students, were lucky enough to work with globally renowned experts Tim Rylands and Sarah Nield looking at many of these aspects. Their pre-term INSET for primary teachers was particularly well received and left teachers buzzing with lots of great ideas for enhancing learning.

Coding is not a set of technical skills but a new type of literacy and personal expression, much like learning to write. Mitch Resnick

Coding can be a challenge as it is often perceived as being hard, but that is far from the truth. Students in our Reception have the opportunity to work with small programmable floor robots called Bee Bots as an introduction to coding. Later, these skills translate onto ipads and subsequently computers as students work on the programming language Scratch. Developed at MIT by Mitch Resnick and his team, Scratch has been a staple of the computing experience at Kellett since around 2008 and many students have explored it’s creative take on programming. This term has seen Years 3 and 5 using the platform across both campuses.

As Coding continues to gain traction in schools, other resources are becoming available, many of them concentrating on the more technical side of the literacy. For students who are well grounded in the creative potential of Scratch, these activities can be a challenging and rewarding experience. Hard fun, if you like. A number of our students have recently enrolled in Code Academy, an online portal offering courses in most of the programming languages required today. These students are spending their own time working through the units, often working before school or during their lunch breaks. Pride of place must go to Ben Robinson, who was the first student to complete the 160 exercises within the Html & CSS module. Well done Ben!

SPORTS DAY Year 5 AND Year 6 This year saw Year 5 and 6 transcend on Stanley Ho running track for another sports day. After some excellent displays of running, jumping and throwing, Kowloon Bay were at it again with 5-CP and 6-SS claiming the spoils, making it three in a row now! Well done to all involved!

Elsewhere, our department continues to support teachers in their use of technology to enhance learning. Inspired by the methods of Tim Rylands, who visited at the start of the academic year thanks to the Annual Fund, students in Year 6 have been using the computer game Dear Esther as a spur to produce writing rich in metaphor, simile and personification. They have also considered the skills they need to give good presentations and have used iPads to give real-time evaluations to presenters. Year 4 students at PFL have been designing information texts about figures from Greek Mythology, whilst at KLB they have been examining traffic data using Google Explore to create graphs and charts. MFL students have been using the game design app Tiny Tap to create and share games that test French language skills. Meanwhile, our after school Techno Club had been dabbling with 3D design and even had a session looking at Augmented Reality animals. Whilst we continue to be ambitious for our work with technology we rely heavily on our infrastructure and support teams to keep things ticking along. Like every institution we occasionally have a few hiccups, but for the past 6 years Freeman Li has been instrumental in keeping us all going. His knowledge of our systems and technology legacy has been vital to our development and it was huge blow to those of us working in technology when he decided to leave us earlier this term. He remains a good friend of the school and still pops in digitally to check up on us. We wish him well for the future!

KELLETT DRAGON NEWSLETTER ISSUE FOURTEEN FEBRUARY 2016