Ruth: We were very lucky to gain funding earlier on this year to buy games and puzzles, and we bought a lot from the Happy Puzzle Company, some from various other sources, and what we did with all the primary 7s coming from various associated primaries - we had an afternoon of fun and games, a maths puzzle afternoon in our hall. This was before the pupils arrived at our school. The way we ran it was we had stations around the room, there was puzzles or games on each station, we blew a whistle every seven minutes and pupils moved on - it was very much for them to have a social occasion that they were meeting each other and getting to know each other before they came to secondary. However, it was also to be a fun afternoon and most pupils seemed to have enjoyed it.
David: One of the things I was very keen that the department became involved in was to establish stronger links with our associated primary schools, and I thought that the CAME project, working with primary schools and working on the CAME project, would be a way of looking at classroom practice, teaching approaches, and that would be a good way of establishing stronger links.
The programme was set up really in four phases and the first phase involved a trainer coming to the school and doing some demonstration lessons - and this is followed by a period where the teachers went and carried out the lessons in their own classrooms, and were about to evaluate the success or otherwise of these lessons. Phase two is going to involve demonstration lessons in one of our associated primary schools, and again that will be followed by some practice with the teachers in their own classrooms. Phases three and four are a bit more ambitious, perhaps, where we're going to be looking at primary teachers observing secondary staff teaching some of the lessons, and in turn vice-versa, we'll have the secondary teachers observing primary colleagues teaching lessons in the classroom. We feel that that should give us a strong link with the different schools and a focus on teaching approaches - and the discussion that should come from that, we think, will be very useful in the primary-secondary liaison process.