Rolling along in Cardiff

On Wednesday 7th March David Barlex travelled to Cardiff to work with Paul King, Adviser for Design & Technology, and a group of primary teachers. The topic was mechanisms.

The participants discussed their particular situations and it was interesting to note that over half were using the immersion method for teaching design & technology. This involves allocating a significant block of time e.g. two whole days or four half days several times a year.

The bulk of the session was taken with tackling two primary solution units. At KS1 "How will your roly poly move?" and at KS2 "How will our beast open its mouth". As always roly-poly was an instant success and all agreed that it would be easy to implement in their school and that the children would enjoy it and learn from it.

The point of doing a KS1 And KS2 unit in a day is for teachers to experience progression first hand. There was complete agreement that designing and making a beast with a moving mouth was much more demanding!

There was little in the way of off task chat and at times the level of concentration gave rise to an almost silent room. However the results as you can see indicated that the effort was worthwhile - all using the same licking mechanism, but in different animals. They valued highly experience of doing it for themselves and all agreed that it was an appropriate task for children in years 5 or 6 and that they would learn a great deal from it.

Most felt they would now be able to teach it in their school. For those who weren't sure Paul was able to make the offer of co-teaching which they quickly accepted.