SALAD
Tamesin Quinn
/ Categories: News
Repeating the success of last year's 'no pens' day!
Following on from the success of last year’s SALAD we organised another ‘no pens’ day on 10th December.
SALAD stands for ‘Speaking and Listening Action Day’, the idea of having a SALAD is that academy teachers used a variety of activities to encourage pupils to develop their oracy skills.
Reading and writing are extremely valuable skills, however, the importance of speaking and listening skills can be underestimated. During SALAD day staff encouraged and developed pupils’ contributions to speaking and listening activities.
This year, we asked teachers to do either a starter, main or plenary speaking and listening activity and there was a fantastic selection of ‘starter’, ‘mains’ or ‘desserts’, for example:
English
* Pupils created their own flash fiction (short stories) and read these out to their peers, building confidence and celebrating work.
* Two Year 8 classes were brought together to create a court case and pupils acted as judge, jury, defendant and prosecutor, using their knowledge of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to decide if Romeo was guilty for the murder of Tybalt.
Maths
* Using mirrors in the sports hall to aid their understanding, Year 7s learnt about symmetry and reflection.
* Year 11s were challenged in a maths quiz and raced each other to calculate puzzles in their heads in order to win their team prizes.
Music
* Year 8 pupils were encouraged to try out a variety of musical instruments they were not usually comfortable with.