Teach-Primary-Issue-19.7

ORACY ACTIVITIES FIRE! If you’re teaching about the Great Fire of London, there is a plethora of source material children can engage with beyond Samuel Pepys’ diary. Why not place two paintings on tables and guide children to identify the narrative they can observe? You can find some paintings on the Fire of London site at tinyurl.com/tp-FoL Then, get children to partner up with someone who studied the other painting to compare and contrast. Ensure pupils understand it is not a matter of right and wrong, but of different interpretations. WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS When teaching about the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, begin by teaching the children about the raid itself, and then focus on who recorded the raid. Ensure children are aware we have a limited picture of this event. Then, break the class into different groups (monks, Anglo-Saxon kings, Vikings) and then discuss what their reaction to the raid may have been and why. Ensure children support their response with logical underpinnings. MAKE YOUR CASE Finally, my favourite is to play the fool in the lesson and offer an assertion that is intentionally ‘wrong’ or a justification which is intentionally ‘weak’. Children are then tasked to debate the weakness of my assertion and either challenge it or change the evidence to strengthen. guide pupils to reflect on their learning, and to provide opportunities to deepen thinking by challenging them through questions, and playing devil’s advocate (the fun part!) to outline the gaps in logic or evidence they might be able to fill with further research. Oracy in practice Over the last two years, I have been teaching in UKS2 at a school in North Leeds. Something we identified quite early on was that the children could state facts, but they didn’t think to extend those facts by providing an explanation as to the power of the evidence. We found that we needed to scaffold scaffolds to progressively transfer the thinking from teacher to pupil. This led us to question why we weren’t using this kind of support system across the foundation curriculum, too. The answer was simply that we hadn’t considered doing so! Now, the learning is heavily scaffolded early on in the unit, and guides children through each stage of answering their enquiry questions, including the vocabulary choice at both substantive and disciplinary levels. The scaffold is then faded away over time in a similar way to maths and English. Because this model is used across units and subjects, it provides ample opportunity for children to get to grips with both oral and written answers. By seeking out these opportunities to engage with the contested nature of the past, and to support pupils to grasp meaning through the enquiry process, we can develop children’s understanding of history as it’s discussed and deliberated in the real world, and we get the added benefit of developing pupils’ ability to express themselves clearly and sequence their thinking. This not only benefits children’s understanding of history, but improves their engagement with the rest of the curriculum, too. TP their thinking, and help them develop greater fluency to be able to answer questions in depth. Throughout the two years we’ve been focusing on an oracy approach, the children have improved their ability to go beyond a statement of fact. The school now uses the same model across every unit of history, and – where appropriate – in geography, too. So, how did we develop this approach? It began with some reflections on the nature of history lessons. We realised that in English, we provided WAGOLLs to support pupils’ understanding of a high-quality answer, and in maths, we used faded Stuart Tiffany is a primary teacher, history CPD provider and consultant. He is also the author of Mr TDoes Primary History (£21.99, SAGE). @Mr_S_Tiffany mrtdoeshistory.com F EATURE S H I S TOR Y www.teachwire.net | 33