At Westwood, we aim to consistently provide a culture of creativity and inspiration for our children. We are always looking for different strategies to raise children's attainment and attitudes as well as their physical health and emotional well being. That's why this year all our staff are adopting BURN2LEARN as a way to enthuse, excite and engage children in the classroom! This physically active learning approach is delivered across all subjects and strives to get the children off their seats, not only as a way to raise attainment but improve children's health, communication and leadership skills. Children can often be seen running outside and through the school completing cross - curricular orienteering activities, throwing and catching balls in the classroom to improve their times table knowledge or even taking part in figurative language relays!
During each BURN2LEARN lesson or activity, children aspire to meet certain outcomes which helps them to evaluate their own learning and contribution to the task. They are displayed in every classroom ensuring consistency throughout the school. These outcomes are:
Here are a few of the Burn 2 Learns we have used in 5/6W so far:
As part of our adventure, A Journey Through The Decades, we had to learn many facts about the Moon Landing. To help with this, we took part in a Burn2Learn where the children had to hunt out 17 facts hidden around the room and match them to the correct question. While one person from each group - sent by the Burn2Learn leader - hunted out the fact, the rest had to be doing exercises or matching the questions to the answers.
The first part of our new adventure, Pompeii Palaver, involved finding out all about the country of Italy. Rather than just find the facts in a book, we had to hunt around school - inside and out - to find envelopes containing the facts and match them to the subheading when we got them back to class.
Before writing an explanation about earthquakes, we had to learn some of the terminology so, using a burn 2 learn, we created a glossary by matching the terms to their meanings. During this task though, we were interrupted by the song we are learning this half term - Pompeii by Bastille - at which point we had to stop matching and start moving around the classroom.
Before writing a setting description of Pompeii for our adventure, we took part in a gallery walk around the classroom: first adding an expanded noun phrase to each picture then reading other children's ideas.
In preparation for SATs, we have been revising hard! When recapping everything we have covered in SPAG, we used a Burn2Learn to revise Word categories. When the music played we have to do exercises: jogging on the spot, sit-ups, press-ups and even squats. When the music stopped though, we had to match the word types to their meanings.
In SPAG, we have started learning about synonyms, words that are similar in meaning, and antonyms, words that have the opposite meaning.
For this Burn2Learn, every member of the class was given a slip of paper with a word on it and had to move around the classroom in order to find the person with the matching word: first the antonym then the synonym.
As a Burn 2 Learn, we took the classic classroom game Fizz Buzz and made it Physical. On this occasion, we used our 3 and 4 times tables with a different action for each times table.
In our adventure, A whole New World, we have just arrived in Australia. Australia, we discovered, is made up of several different states. As part of a Burn 2 Learn, we had to assemble Australia like a jigsaw from the separate states, however whenever the music played, we had to stop the task and do the conga around the classroom!
Once back to the table, we had to match the word to its definition.
As part of our adventure, Rio vs the Rainforest, we met a young Brazilian boy called Ricardo who wanted to show us his home. Before he did though we had to take part in a gallery walk to look at the six clues he had given us.
At each clue, we had to write what we thought it was and what it might mean on a postit and stick it beside the picture. After visiting each clue, we had to work out which part of Rio we thought Ricardo lived in.
As part of our SPAG lesson, while learning about hyphens, we went on a hunt around school for 12 hidden envelopes which held half of a hyphenated word. Once we had collected all 12, we had to bring them back to class and match them up with the correct ending.To make it harder, some of the beginning words matched with more than one end word...