Hastings PEEL

We wish our Clarence Cluster all the very best for their upcoming PEEL Staff Development Day. This is the second cluster day that has been conducted in our Diocese within a year and we know that the momentum behind PEEL is fantastic. For those attending the details are as follows

Where: Mary Help of Christians Primary School, Sawtell

When: 27th March, 2009

Good luck and enjoy the sharing of wisdom.

Hasting PEEL Cluster.

Webkinz World is a great place to learn and play!

The class pet that doesn’t mess your room, yet has a world of its own online. Your class can buy it furniture and provide exercise and games. They can learn to use money wisely as well as improve their navigation skills and literacy skills at the same time.

Where do you get these???? Try you local TOYWORLD or simply go online and find our more

www.webkinz.com

( Year 5 at St Agnes Port Macquarie are having a great time exploring the possibilities of such class pets… they can tell you more)

• Your child can learn lots of fun facts at Quizzy’s. The questions at Quizzy’s are age-appropriate, and most are educationally based.
• We also have several arcade games that promote learning:
  • Lunch Letters helps children to learn how to type and spell
  • Quizzy’s Word Challenge aids in spelling
  • Operation Gumball encourages children to think logically
• Webkinz Newz and the W Tales encourage reading, and our many contests encourage writing, creativity, and problem-solving.
• Your child can learn about money in Webkinz World; by earning KinzCash, your child learns how to save and spend money.
• Webkinz World also helps to teach children about responsibility, caring for a pet, and getting along with others.

Take the tour and decide for yourself.

Webkinz World is getting better and better all the time.

Photos of some webkinz are on our Flickr site.

You may have noticed an absence of items being posted to our blog over the last few months. Not only have we enjoyed a well earned holiday break, we have also experienced a great turnover of the members of our team. We would like to take the opportunity to thank those members who have left our team and gone on to other endeavours, especially Brendan and Paul who were very much the driving force behind our blog site and PEEL within our cluster.

We welcome our new members and are very excited about the potential of our group as we venture into planning our next professional development day.

Try this free site out!!

http://classtools.net/

This site has a collection of wonderful classroom tools that are both teacher/student friendly.

Most procedures are interactive and can be downloaded and printed from your computer.

If you have any more wonderful sites that you have come across please send them into

the PEEL Hastings team.

Thanks Amanda Wood for this one.

http://www.bubbl.us/

Peter Triglone
Computer Support

St. Mary’s School Bellingen

1. Timetable PEEL

This has worked really well this year as at the start of the year I was able to lock in 40 minutes which can be used specifically to teach a new PEEL procedure. The students gain a better understanding of the ways it can be used and it can be taught in a more relaxed atmosphere. Having PEEL Procedures written into the timetable makes me more organised to locate procedures that will suit my class at any given time.

2. One Minute Checks

Students are given a group task to do in a set time. Within the time given the teacher and students can nominate 1,2 or 3 times that a member of the group can go and look at what the other groups are doing and bring back ideas to their own group. One minute is allowed for each check. They cannot interfere with the other groups.

The teacher monitors the time and physically marks it off from a board so students can see how long they have left and when they are allowed to check the other groups.

eg If the class is given 15 minutes to construct a cube the following may be seen on the board..

15                                            10                                     5                    

14                                            9                                       4

13                                            8                                       3             

12                                            7 (1 minute check )         2

11 ( 1 minute check)              6                                       1 ………..STOP

I have found it important to set a minimum level to get to. For example, in this case it could be drawing and cutting out the net shape.

3. It’s Alright to Share

At the start of the year I noticed that some students found it very difficult to let others access the information they had or know when it was alright to share. After years of being told not to look at other student’s work and “keep their eyes to themselves”, this was I suppose quite understandable. As a class we discussed the benefits of sharing process and knowledge, when this was appropriate and I have tried to make it a point to praise those students who helped out others by doing this.

Two groups tended to struggle a little with this concept. Firstly, some of the more academic students felt they had to give away their “secrets ”and the secondly students on the autism spectrum also seemed to find this a difficult task.

Putting some procedures in place to overcome this have overcome many of the issues at the beginning of the year. I’m also guessing that the age group would have a bearing on this!!!!

by Paul Burke, St Josephs Primary Port Macquarie

Stage pages have now been created that include units of work incorporating PEEL strategies. Please feel free to click onto these pages and access the units. They are in formats which can be adapted to suit your needs.

As a part of the primary/secondary group from the Lismore Diocese attending the national PEEL conference during August, I had the opportunity to visit the Immigration Museum of Melbourne.

The session we attended at the Immigration Museum education centre was more rewarding than I had initially anticipated. We were treated to a tour of all the exhibits, and also shown a range of PEEL inquiry approaches that the Museum’s educational facilitators run for students from Years 5 – 9. 

Within a lesson, the students are encouraged to use PEEL inquiry strategies. They are required to gather information, discover materials and interpret artifacts. A ‘mystery box’ containing a variety of artifacts is offered to students in the form of a suitcase, chest or bag.  They are asked to interpret the artifacts to determine the personal/family history including such things as the era, country of origin, occupation, fashion and interests. Incorporating the PEEL process, students learn to question, form hypotheses, analyze materials and delve into investigative procedures.

If you have the chance to visit Melbourne, the Immigration Museum should be high on the list of places to visit.  It offers a comprehensive experience to all and you will be greatly impressed with what awaits you inside. School groups wishing to attend a day with the museums educational facilitators, Rosario Zarro from the Melbourne Museum, and Jan Molloy and Liza Suda from the Immigration Museum, will be in for an enriching encounter. If you require an offsite experience, then the Museum can cater to your classroom so enter the website address http://museumvictoria.com.au/ImmigrationMuseum/ and enjoy the online learning.

For personal enjoyment you can immerse yourself in the history of Melbourne, or as an educator you can generate a school experience that will have every student enthralled and enriched. The Melbourne Immigration Museum should be added to your list of most used educational websites.

By Brendan Kiely

Day one commenced with some innovative, engaging sessions.

My personal favourite was a presentation from Jo Olser (who I initially saw present PEEL over 12 months ago) who with her entire 5/6 class demonstrated how PEEL can be used in the classroom. It was fantastic to observe PEEL in complete implementation and even more impressive to observe the students in Jo’s class take ownership for their own learning.

The second day was even better. A small group of primary teachers visited Berwick Fields Primary School to observe a Year 1/2 Literacy session. An amazing young teacher named Tanya demonstrated a sequence of PEEL lessons which highlighted the importance of common language such as moving on, fat & skinny questions and working beyond perfectly. I sat absolutely dumbfounded when a seven year boy told me he was adding more information to his grid to “work beyond what he was asked to do”. When I questioned him what he meant, this seven year old explained that he could just answer the five points or if he wanted to be an “active leaner” with good learning behaviours he would work beyond that. He then led me over to the good behaviour chart and pointed our which ones he always uses.

Once I recovered from that, I observed the children working through a sequence of procedures- labelled diagram, information grid and fishbone which all led towards writing a narrative based on the character from their initial labelled diagram.

Every child in the room was actively engaged and working at their own level for the duration of the session.

Tanya (the classroom teacher) emphasised that she had spent an entire term exposing the children to the language and procedures of PEEL and the build up of PEEL language and procedures are essential for success.

PEEL is not about pulling out some one off graphic organisers, it is about teaching children how to actively learn how to learn.

By: Sarah Corsalini

The 2008 PEEL Conference was broken in to two days. The first day consisted of a Key Note session and workshops with the second day comprising of a visit to a school where the application of the PEEL philosophy was common practice.

Day one started with a group of teachers who each have undertaken a research project to look at the effectiveness of introducing PEEL into their rooms. Each teacher told of their journey through this process. This was an interesting way to present a Key Note session.

Following this, it was time to move to a series of four workshop sessions. The ones I attended ranged from simple applications of games in the classroom to a looking at one school’s method of using Peer Facilitation to develop teaching practice.

A visit to Museum Victoria-Immigration in Australia proved to be very interesting indeed. The presenters are always looking for ways to engage the many student groups that come through the doors. They have approached many of their discovery experiences using PEEL procedures. The use of “story boxes” where items provided clues about people who had immigrated to Australia opened up many possibilities for the classroom environment.

The day was also a great opportunity to talk to teachers who are at varying stages of introducing or developing PEEL procedures in their classes and schools. Email addresses and Blog sites were exchanged. Technology is a phenomenal thing!!!!!

Day Two saw a small group of us trek out to the outer suburbs of Melbourne to Berwick Fields Primary School. The Assistant Principal had led the session on Peer Facilitation the previous day. The time spent to get there was certainly worthwhile. This school was an amazing place.

The school tour and chance to sit in on a Literacy Block using a PEEL procedure sequence, personally confirmed the strength of the teaching practice and philosophies behind PEEL.

One thought that has stayed with me is that PEEL is not just about the procedures implemented but more importantly it is about the language that is used in the classroom. It is the language of PEEL, shared between teachers and students that really form the foundations which allow children to become independent and motivated learners. The children learn how to learn!

 2008-peel-conference-slideshow