UK TALK FOR LEARNING NEWS!

DFE Experts Panel Report, following consultation on the new National Curriculum, is now published on DFE website. Chapter Nine emphasises the importance of oral language development on closing the gap in attainment at 11. Our UK gap is a lot wider than other countries, because up to now we have only paid lip service to oracy. As Andrew Wilkinson wrote in 1965 "Rhetoric was never one of the three 'R's". Will this government now ignore the experts?

email: stuart.scott@collaborativelearning.org

PS The site is being reconstructed to make resources more accessible, work better on ipads and create room for more activities. Please email me if you find any bad links.

Welcome to Collaborative Learning! This website tries to be a "three clicks and you're there" site. It is designed for speedy access to resources. Most of the site contains downloadable teaching activities to promote talk, which we hope you will adapt to your needs, and/or use as templates for producing your own teaching activities.

We want to provide interesting ways for children to learn in classes, where many different languages are spoken, and where children are learning English while accessing the whole curriculum.

Our aim is to provide examples of EAL friendly group talk activities that will benefit all children, while at the same time provide scaffolding for learning English. Collaborative activities are vital for children learning English, but at the same time other learners benefit in many ways. They are good for developing sustained shared thinking, and also help retention of information through pleasurable repetition. They provide opportunities for all the children in a class to work with every other child at some point during the week. Children new to English need exposure to visually stimulating collaborative talk activities in short sessions throughout their learning, if they are going to be able to draw on their prior knowledge and skills.

We are now putting more illustrations into the more recently posted activities so they will be a little slower to download, but they will be much more accessible for new arrivals. We are adding new webpages which contain a picture view of the activity. These will give a flavour of the activity, and at the same we are trying to improve our descriptions. We are also aiming to double the number of activities this year! We welcome your comments and suggestions! For all the teaching activities you will need Acrobat Reader.

We have now set up in partnership with Mantra Lingua who are working on making our activities sound enabled. It will take a while for this to be done, but our aim is for all our activities to be produced in this format. You will need to register with Mantra and pay a small subscription. You will also need their RecorderPEN or their new PENpal. Once again you will be able to download the activities in pdf, but they will be specially prepared so that you can record onto the paper. So character cards will be able to talk and gameboards can provide instant translation in the language of your choice.

If this is the first time you have visited this site please go here for a short introduction to the project. The NEWSLETTER usually contains information on the most recently posted activities, information on workshops we are running and links to interesting research. We are concentrating on posting activities for schools encountering new arrivals to English, and beginning to include versions in other languages with translated or transliterated. We would argue that five or ten minutes every hour or so during the school day of collaborative work within mainstream classrooms will do a lot more to help new arrivals than an hour of language teaching in isolation. We hope you will be interested in producing more collaborative activities to add to ours?

Click here to find downloadable collaborative learning activities available on the site . They cover all curriculum areas and all key stages including foundation (early years). For some of these activities you have to register with us but there is no charge for this. Can we encourage you to join our network of teachers who are posting activities on this and linked sites.

Description and history of project and a list of commonly asked questions and answers (in html) or questions and answers in leaflet form in pdf about collaborative learning. Booklet on collaborative learning by Steve Cooke.

Would you like to support our work? We only rely on colleagues to spread the word since the project has no funding for publicity! Please download our little publicity leaflet or our even smaller publicity leaflet and hand it out to colleagues and at courses and workshops. Also if you are interested in hosting a workshop please take a look at how this could benefit your school - information here!