Study about Christ the Redeemer Primary School, Belfast
We chose The Blue Planet – The main reason we chose this ICL was because the majority of our topics in P5 had been history based(Hunters and Gatherers, History of Belfast) therefore the focus on ‘The World Around Us’ was refreshing. It immediately appealed to us as teachers, which was important to us in trialling new material. The ICL itself provided lots of scope across all areas of the curriculum. It also seemed very relevant and not as abstract as previous topics. We thought the children would really enjoy it.
To start, we looked through the ICL and chose the learning we wanted to focus on and took time to specify our success criteria. Then, we decided on the activities that might appeal to our children most. Within the Learning Areas (The Arts, Personal Development and The World around Us) we added our own ideas and the additional ideas generated by the children from the planning board. We decided to focus on ‘Working with Others’ from the skills and capabilities strand. We planned the first two weeks of our topic in detail and an outline for the next four weeks. We kept to our timetable of Literacy and Numeracy in the morning and worked on the Blue Planet in the afternoon. Keep reading…
