Examples
If you have examples of activities and events related to out of school learning and you would like to share these with other schools, please send us brief details. Please e-mail Celia Burn or send to Learning and Teaching Scotland, The Optima, 58 Robertson Street, Glasgow, G2 8DU.
Organised out-of-school activities
North Ayrshire primary schools
North Ayrshire Council’s primary schools run family clubs in which children and adults learn together. One of the main rules is that a child can only attend if accompanied by someone over 16, as the main focus is on the children and adults learning together.
Find out more about the family clubs in North Ayrshire primary schools:
PDF file: North Ayrshire family clubs (14 KB)
Word file: North Ayrshire family clubs (33 KB)
John Galt Primary School
A case study of John Galt Primary School, where the first Family Club was piloted, can be found on the Scottish Schools Ethos Network website.
Glencairn Primary School
Find out more about the family club at Glencairn Primary School:
PDF file: Glencairn Primary School family club (18 KB) Word file: Glencairn Primary School family club (41 KB)
Mile End Primary, Aberdeen City has parents who run clubs on a voluntary basis, for example the chess club, young investigators and football clubs. Fathers in particular help with football and there are nine groups involved. Clubs can take place at lunchtime, in the evening and at weekends. As part of a multicultural week parents have run workshops on South American culture, Arabic writing, French cookery and American Indian folktales.
Feedback from the fathers indicates that they really enjoy the opportunity to be involved with their children – both boys and girls take part in the football – and also the fact that they and the children benefit from being active.
Learning at home
Hamilton Grammar, South Lanarkshire: The maths department runs consultation meetings for parents with children in S1 and S2. The purpose is to inform parents of the work being done and to make suggestions about how parents can help their children at home and also to listen to parents’ suggestions and comments.
At the event the mathematics course and national assessment levels are explained and parents are invited to carry out some examples of sums and problems their children will be doing. Parents then get the chance in small groups to have different methods and materials explained and also to use the ICT equipment used in the mathematics lesson. Last year about 75 parents attended. Feedback showed that 94 per cent of the parents thought they would now be able to help with their child’s homework and 98 per cent said they knew what to do if the child needed help from the teacher.
What the parents say:
Very informative. It has certainly prompted me into taking more interest in my child’s homework – including checking it on a regular basis!
Excellent medium for introducing the new classroom concepts for parents with first time participants in secondary education.
Lockerbie High, Dumfries and Galloway, is involving parents in helping pupils in S1 and S2 with an Accelerated Literacy Programme. This has been introduced to help support basic literacy skills as taking pupils out of other classes to do this can be a problem in secondary schools.
Parents of pupils selected for the programme are trained to become tutors in the scheme. They are offered two dates for training to allow them to choose the most suitable. The training sessions are quite short, lasting no longer than 30 minutes. The role of the parent is to see that their child completes the set tasks and manages to return them to the member of staff who is coordinating the programme.
The Doon Learning Partnership, East Ayrshire, has been involved in a family learning project which focuses particularly on literacy and numeracy.
Find out more about the Doon Learning Partnership:
PDF file: Doon Learning Partnership (11 KB) Word file: Doon Learning Partnership (29 KB)
Brucehill Early Education and Child Care Centre, West Dunbartonshire serves an economically and socially diverse community. It has developed science boxes which parents do at home with their children and report back. The boxes were produced and are maintained by parents and staff (teachers and nursery nurses) working together.
The aim is to encourage parents to spend quality time educating their child in a relaxed, informal and fun way. There are 15 boxes. Each family gets access to a box four times a year and so covers four topics. There are two activities per box. Some of the topics covered are:
- using a rainbow (colour)
- bright sparks (electricity)
- mini mania (mini beasts)
- waterama (water)
- head to toe (growing up).
What the parents say:
I enjoyed doing the science project. It was nice to see Jack learning but also having fun. More homework please.
Very enjoyable but two activities are not enough. David was disappointed he didn’t have more things to do.
What the children say:
That was fantastic.
What the staff say:
The discussions with the parents were very positive. Some people felt science was a big scary word but it’s not. Working with parents has opened both our eyes.
Enjoyable experience. I enjoyed working with the parents in a different way. The commitment of the parents was fantastic. Long may it continue.
Support for anytime learning
Aberdeen City – literacy walks: Family learning and home-school teachers have organised literacy walks for parents whose children, aged between 3 and 6 years, attend four primary schools across the city.
Before starting the walk the Family Learning worker explains the importance of environmental print in a child’s learning and points out that by walking to school, to the doctors, to the shops they do literacy walks several times a day.
Much emphasis is placed on getting parents to value what they already do with their children on a daily basis. The ‘literacy walk’ involved the parents and children going on a short walk, based on their usual routes to school, looking out for letters and numbers, for example, road signs, door numbers and advertisements. Parents are encouraged to look for other examples. After this some parents agreed to design and produce their own ‘literacy walk’. (Source: Bastiani et al, 2002)