VCOPDiary

This is the opening page in the diary of a VCOP trial. We have been given some cards by JuliaTeacher to trial on our Year 6s. Basically, the cards are prompts to enable to the children to embed the use of VCOP into their daily work. The school is beginning to embrace VCOP on a large scale, after being initially placed in Year 6 to enhance the children's writing skills for SATs. The opening "Big Write" was useful, and allowed us to baseline the children.

There are lots (and lots) of cards, and Day One is being spent printing them, organising them and then laminating them back-to-back. First suggestion - colour code the cards so that we can see which ones are V.C.O or P! We decided to laminate them back-to-back because it is more resource-efficient, and also because it will allow the children to hold less cards but still be able to play lots of games.

Other immediate thoughts - allow them to "capture" cards from other players and try to build collections. There must be an independent judge watching the game so there are no arguments. Points are won and lost on an individual and team basis, and the opportunity for bonus points could be built in when the children use one of the card challenges in a writing task (their responsibility to identify the task and bonus points!) It might also be nice to identify the cards that are Level 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5, so that we expect a child working at Level 5 to work much harder to win a match when playing against a child working at Level 1. For example, asking an SEN child to produce a sentence with brackets is possibly expecting a bit much against a Level 5 child, but if you ask a Level 5 child to produce a sentence with brackets, but expect the SEN child to produce a Level 1 correct sentence (capital, full stop/question mark).

13 Oct

All cards laminated and ready to go! Class of 24 divided into teams of 4, and given individual score cards. Rules explained as follows: All scores will be 2-1, this will ensure that everyone gets at least 1 point in a match. Children can challenge each other outside of normal lessons (this is to widen the impact in the school). All challenges must be judged by an impartial witness. If there is a query about a result, the two participants must carry out a "face-off" in front of a member of staff, who will declare a winner. Children have 6 cards each (they were laminated double-sided, so in effect they have 12 cards). On a Friday, the team captains will collect in the score cards and total them up to see which team is doing best. If a score sheet is lost, then the points on that sheet are also lost!

Children are ridiculously excited over this, it took a long time to calm them back down once they had their cards and score sheets, and they were practising on each other immediately. Because this is a "talk" activity, the lower ability children are keen to prove they can beat the "higher ability" children.

The cards were all issued to the team captains, who in turn allocated them to players. This encourages the team captain to think about the strengths of their team, and it will be interesting to see if they change strategies later on.

Suggestions from other teachers immediately are based around "collecting" cards - perhaps if they are colour coded we could use them like "Happy Families", and each team tries to collect an entire colour from the rest of the class.

15 Oct

The cards are a complete hit - total wildfire around the school. It looks like we are going to have to spread outwards to other classes and years, and show other teachers how this works. The children are challenging each other continually, and even getting PPA cover teachers to let them play at the end of lessons! They are in the playground with them, and some parents have seen them appearing at home. Adults are being asked to arbitrate in some games, and I have also been using cards as "quick challenges" when children come to ask me questions. A raving success - tomorrow is Big Writing day, and they also get to total their cards to see which team has won!