Building Blocks by tlpwales

Responsive Planning and Real Time Monitoring Tool

Also available in Welsh

Responsive Planning and Real Time Monitoring Tool Following Professor Donaldson’s curriculum review ‘Successful Futures’, which outlines an aspirational and powerful curriculum for Wales, we are delighted to launch our bi-lingual planning and monitoring tool - Building Blocks®. Are you looking to… Further develop your school’s curriculum offer in line with Professor Donaldson’s review? Use 21st century technology to plan for children’s learning? Provide children with exciting opportunities to apply literacy and numeracy skills across the curriculum and in real-life scenarios? Have access to 250+ fully editable rich tasks each with a clear teaching outline, that are time-saving for teachers? Allow teachers to plan their own rich tasks using an efficient and time saving tool? Provide senior leaders with access to real-time monitoring tools that can be accessed at anytime and in any place? Be prepared for the proposed curriculum changes that are outlined in ‘Successful Futures’?

If the answer is ‘yes’ to any of the above then book a place on one of our free Building Blocks® Open Days to find out more. This two-hour presentation will provide you with an opportunity to peruse the materials and to see the Building Blocks® portal in action.

A New Curriculum and Vision for Wales Building Blocks® Rich Tasks Challenges are written to provide children with opportunities to use and apply literacy and numeracy skills in real life and meaningful contexts. The 250+ rich tasks are in line with Professor Donaldson’s 10 Principles of Curriculum Design. The tasks draw upon educational research and sound pedagogy incorporating learning theories from Piaget, Bruner, Dienes, Vygotsky, Poyla, Skemp, Gardner as well as ‘best practice’ from Wales and around the world.

The challenges are relevant to the needs of today, easily understood by all, encompassing an entitlement to high quality education for every child and young person. They are ambitious in nature allowing children to develop competencies, which will allow them to engage confidently with the challenges of their future lives.

The tasks include the everyday routines and events that take place within the primary school ensuring that the learning opportunities offered in assemblies, productions, charity days and sports days are recognised.

The Rich Tasks follow Professor Donaldson’s 10 Principles of Curriculum Design 2

What is Building Blocks®? 250+ Exciting Rich Tasks and the ability to create your own!

A bilingual, cross platform planning and monitoring tool bringing together your school’s documentation easily and neatly. A bank of over 250 exciting and fully editable ‘Rich Tasks’ that are available in English and Welsh. All challenges are crossreferenced with the revised curriculum (2014) for Welsh, English and Mathematics. A digital planning tool designed to save teachers’ time and to provide them with the assurance that they are meeting their statutory responsibilities. A monitoring tool that records the skills that have been planned as well as those that have been covered. At a glance, Senior Leaders can identify what’s happening, where as well as any gaps in the statutory curriculum.

Plan

Teach

Review Plan With over 250 fully editable, exciting rich tasks and challenges - planning couldn’t be easier. The rich tasks are cross-referenced with the most up-to-date curriculum, year group, by year group. Each ‘rich task’ or ‘challenge’ is accompanied by a clear teaching outline for minimal fuss and maximum results.

Teach The Building Blocks® portal is accessible anywhere there is an Internet connection. Building Blocks® allows you to put your planning into practice, wherever you are. You can access and amend your lesson plans to reflect what is really happening in the classroom.

Review Review

Dynamic, real time curriculum information and reporting at your finger-tips. Bring your entire curriculum planning, monitoring

Dynamic, real time curriculum information and reporting at your finger-tips.together, simply, easily and all in one and reporting Bring your entire curriculum planning, monitoring and reporting together, simply, easily®and all in one place. place. Building Blocks generates in depth reports Building Blocks generates in depth reports in various formats to streamline your workload.

in various formats to streamline your workload.

Building Blocks® NURSERY CHALLENGES The Building Blocks® Nursery challenges are a set of 16 provision cards aimed specifically at supporting practitioners working with three and four year olds. Each provision card is rich in opportunities to develop both literacy and numeracy skills and outlines how, and why, Powerful Play in different areas of provision supports the key developmental domains in young children. As well as the educational rationale on why each area of provision is so important in child development, challenges also identify what the continuous provision might look like in an early years setting. Drawing from outstanding practice, the cards outline the attitudes, dispositions, actions and concepts that are evident in each area of provision. The progression in each area is outlined in the enhanced provision section looking at challenging provocations before the ‘final challenge’.

Building Blocks® NUMERACY CHALLENGES Building Blocks® Numeracy challenges are specifically written to strengthen mathematical reasoning in real life, meaningful contexts. The tasks focus on applying numeracy skills in an interdisciplinary way ensuring cross-curricular links and coverage. The challenges themselves are exciting and engaging activities that will develop and enhance current practice. Each ‘Rich Task’ is written to the statements of expectation for each year group thus ensuring continuity and progression through each mathematical strand and element.

Building Blocks® LITERACY CHALLENGES

Building Blocks® is an easy to use, powerful and innovative planning and monitoring tool ideal for busy teachers and school leaders

Building Blocks® Literacy challenges are written to the text types identified by the Welsh Government. The ‘Rich Tasks’ are a bank of learning experiences and challenges that follow the progressive stepped continuum of the revised curriculum (2014). The tasks can be used as engaging activities to support the discrete teaching of Literacy within the school or as a focused activity to embed Literacy across the curriculum. The tasks themselves are also separated by ‘form’ ensuring progression and breadth of learning experience across the whole primary age range. 5

The Building Blocks® Online Portal The online portal is the most powerful and informative part of Building Blocks®. It brings your planning up-to-date using 21st century technology. Your school will have access to its own secure planning environment for as many users as your school requires. The Building Blocks® Online Portal has a proven efficiency in its use of time in planning and monitoring the curriculum in primary schools. The true functionality of the portal is immense and only limited by your imagination!

The Challenge Section In the ‘Challenges Section’, the portal allows you to select, edit and develop the pre-populated rich tasks to meet the needs of your children. You can create your own challenges too. In fact, many schools use Building Blocks for all their planning and monitoring, as it is time efficient and user friendly. You can differentiate and cross-reference the rich tasks with other areas of the curriculum. Once the teaching phase has taken place, you are then able to evaluate the task and monitor exactly which skills were covered. The portal simultaneously gathers information for generating reports.

The Building Blocks® portal is accessible anywhere there is an internet connection

The Calendar Section In the ‘Calendar Section’ the portal enables you to plan ahead for the whole year, for the month, or for the week. You can duplicate and amend challenges and share them between parallel classes as required. The ‘archive’ facility allows teachers to centrally store their planning over a longer period and to retrieve it when needed, in order to adapt and update it. This function again saves precious time and avoids unnecessary workload.

The Resource Section The Resource Section contains a variety of downloadable resources to help in the planning of a challenge. They are intended to support active learning and are not worksheets to be completed by the children. These take a variety forms including:

The Report Section In the ‘Report Section’, the portal allows you to generate real time reports that show different levels of detail with regards to the areas of the curriculum that have been planned for, and covered. This essential tool will provide teachers and senior leaders with up-to-date information at the click of a button. The filter tools allow you to drill down into subject areas, classes and phases. All reports can be viewed on the screen or downloaded as required.

• ‘Quick reference’ teacher materials to aid knowledge and understanding of text types and form • ‘Top Tips’ on how to… • Links to online resources, webpages, YouTube… • Starting points on where and how to introduce a challenge • Downloadable and editable PowerPoint presentations • PDFs images of resources slide shows etc…

Testimonial Building Blocks® offers a great package for learning. The children enjoy the whole process from the Anchor Phase where they get engaged in new innovative ways and become involved in collaboration from the word go. In the Fusion Phase, it is interesting to watch the children learning collaboratively. In ‘Great British Bake Off’ the children calculated costs of shopping lists and compared different supermarkets. They had a budget to go to a local supermarket to buy the ingredients. The challenge evidenced the children in applying and using skills in a meaningful and purposeful context, preparing them for everyday life in the real world. Using the LNF framework, Building Blocks® allows children to try out their own ideas and lets them make mistakes and talk about problems. The challenges can be big or small. I love using them and they always evolve in different ways. The portal is easy to use and in an instant it helps to show coverage of planning and monitoring against Literacy and Numeracy. It reflects the interdisciplinary nature of our curriculum. The projects are easy to adapt to link with any topic. My favourite challenge so far is ‘Luscious Lunches’ where the project had such an impact that my class started a healthy lunch campaign as a result of their research. Three words to describe the experience of ‘Building Blocks’ - freedom, collaboration and fun. It’s a reflective process! Rhian Milton, Year 3 Teacher, Cadoxton Primary School, Barry

Before using Building Blocks速 I felt I was over planned yet under prepared. Now I can focus on my preparation in the classroom to deliver high impact, engaging, and meaningful lessons for the children.

The Original Building Blocks® Package

Building Blocks® Printed Card Pack 250+ printed rich task challenges packaged together in two Building Blocks® cases 16 Nursery cards 112 Literacy Cards Reception to Year 6 125 Numeracy Cards Reception to Year 6

Building Blocks® Online Secure access to the online planning and monitoring tool

Set up of school’s users (no restrictions on number of individual users) 1 Year full online support Access to 250+ fully editable rich tasks Access to planning and monitor tools for individual users Access to over 350 planning resources and supportive documentation

Whole School Training We provide a full day of Building Blocks® training, either at our training centre in Llanelli,

or at your school. Ideally, we train your teachers during a school closure day, however, we are able to deliver the training as part of a teacher release day.

Our promise to you… Building Blocks® planning and monitoring tool gives you security and confidence because you are assured that the portal reflects the most up-to-date curriculum information available. The on-line curriculum component will be updated, free of charge, as new areas of the curriculum are introduced. Building Blocks® also has the capability to plan and monitor the ‘New Curriculum for Wales’. When the new structure and content is known, Building Blocks® will ensure a seamless transfer without duplicating existing planning. We’ve taken your views about the current educational challenges and developed Building Blocks®, so that you have more time to spend on the important part of teaching and learning and less time away from the children.

When children are engaged in learning and loving it, as teachers we know that success and progress will follow. It’s easy to say, but the hard part is making sure that it happens in our classrooms each and every day. Building Blocks® is an easy to use, powerful and innovative planning, monitoring and reporting device for busy teachers and school leaders.

We look forward to welcoming you to one of our Building Blocks® Open Days Places are free of charge, but limited to three people per school. Telephone 01554 749043 and book now to reserve your places! Summer Term 2015 South Wales Open Days

North Wales Open Days

Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, Llanelli Thursday, 4th June 2015, Llanelli Wednesday, 8th July 2015, Llanelli Thursday, 9th July 2015, Llanelli

Tuesday, 16th June 2015, Bangor Wednesday, 17th June, 2015, Llandudno Thursday, 18th June 2015, St. Asaph Friday, 19th June 2015, Wrexham

Autumn Term 2015 South Wales Open Days

North Wales Open Days

Wednesday, 9th September 2015, Llanelli Thursday, 10th September 2015, Llanelli Wednesday, 11th November 2015, Llanelli Thursday, 12th November 2015, Llanelli

Tuesday 22nd, September 2015, Bangor Wednesday, 23rd September, 2015, Llandudno Thursday, 24th September 2015, St. Asaph Friday, 25th September 2015, Wrexham

Arrange a presentation at your school Invite a cluster of head teachers and senior leaders to your school, or to our training centre for a Building Blocks® presentation and demonstration. For your convenience, we also provide individual school visits to meet with the headteacher and senior leaders to demonstrate Building Blocks®.

Pricing We know that no two schools are the same, so we have created a number of pricing options to reflect the size of your school. Prices are available upon request.

Get in Touch We’re a friendly team who are always happy to answer any of your questions or queries. If you require further information on any of our services, open days, events or simply wish to talk to us about Building Blocks® - please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on 01554 749043. 12

The Learning Partnership, Wales Llys Aur Llanelli Gate Llanelli SA14 8LQ Telephone 01554 749043 Email info@tlpwales.co.uk General Information www.tlpwales.co.uk Building Blocks速 www.building-blocks.org.uk Design: www.creative-loop.co.uk Photography: Photographs taken by Huw John with kind permission from Cadoxton Primary School.