Wednesday 7 January 2009

My colleague Pete Thurlow, Area Manager within the Education Leeds School Improvement Service sent me this e-mail...

"Chris, I thought I'd email you to let you know about an excellent project which completed just before Christmas- this was Windmill Primary School, who partnered with South Leeds CLC on a 'Handheld Learning' programme. We did some INSET work with the school then lent them a class set of Nintendo DS consoles so their Year 6 students could practice their mental maths skills using the 'Dr Kawashimi's Brain Training' software. The school benchmarked the children's attainment at the start of the programme using SAT test materials, and then used the DS consoles as a maths starter activity every day for six weeks. On retesting, it was found that the childrens' average mental maths capability had improved by 51%. What's more, I have a set of thankyou letters from the children saying how much they'd enjoyed themselves! The project is set to repeat with Middleton Primary next week, and then Ingram Road in March-April as part of their build towards SATs. Regards Pete."

It's great to hear about brilliant initiatives like this and the impact they are having.

Chris

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