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 | | What is R2L?
Welcome to Ready 2 Learn (R2L), BGfL's free downloadable resource from Chris Hudson, Birmingham teacher and author.
R2L is designed to help you teach moral values for Citizenship to a class over the space of an entire academic year. Each unit of work is organised as a series of mini-lessons designed to last 20-30 minutes. | | | | | |     |  | | | | Each session or mini-lesson ... | | | aims to stimulate a high level of pupil thinking and discussion | | | | offers an emphasis on purposeful activity and sensitive reflection.
No stories are involved, except for the ones you include for personal illustration! | | | | Each session also includes an opportunity for an act of collective worship, making
it suitable for use in classroom assemblies. | | | | | All files are downloadable in Word format. |
Take a look now!
| | | | How R2L Began | | | (- Chris Hudson, author) | | | How do you teach values to children?
As a school, we had developed a child-friendly list of values such as Respect and Caring but how do you explain them and discuss them and teach them, systematically, in a busy working week?
We were also thinking about our school assemblies, and how we needed something a little different. The hall could barely hold everyone, so it was only used for upper school and lower school assemblies on Mondays and Fridays.
Other acts of Collective Worship were left to individual teachers in their classrooms - but many teachers felt uncomfortable with the idea of leading worship . How do you do it just have a story, a prayer, and notices? Despite some valiant efforts, the results often weren t particularly dynamic. You can't teach what you don't know.
Then we had the idea for doing something different. As an educational author, I was used to creating material for use with assemblies, RE and Citizenship. Why not create a user-friendly resource for our staff that taught values?
There would be no story-telling, deliberately - instead, it would be active, with opportunities for role-play, games and discussion and it could still close in an act of collective worship. (It would even have relevance for the new SEAL initiative, exploring the social and emotional aspects of learning.)
Staff could have a script to follow, adjusting it to suit their pupil ability and age-range and it would be called Ready 2 Learn or R2L, for short.
So I started writing these sessions in July 2005. In September, I led an INSET for all our teachers and teaching assistants explaining how it worked, and took the risk of running an R2L there and then, pitched at adults. (Bless them, they threw themselves into enjoying it even the meditation and prayer at the end.)
The rest have been created through the academic year 2006-2006, and they continued to receive a lot of positive feedback from staff.
So now it s available to you. Enjoy! | | | | | | How It Works | | | Click here to find out 'How It Works' - a document providing the main points for organising R2L in your own classroom or school. Don't adopt it slavishly - you will probably need to adjust it to suit your own situation.
If introducing the programme for use as a whole-school initiative, then discuss it with your Senior Management Team, put it into your School Improvement Plan, and use INSET time to introduce it clearly for your staff. There is a downloadable file with suggestions for this.
Keen readers may note that the faith-based elements of R2L are based on Christianity and Judaism, largely because that is my own faith background - it s what I know. Please have no hesitating in adjusting this material to suit your own faith outlook, or that of the pupils you teach. The values are the crucial element, and R2L is about teaching values, not reinforcing particular faith positions. | | | | | | Copyright Issues | | | Please feel free to copy and adjust the units to suit your own school situation.
We have not claimed copyright over this material - but reproducing it for profit without crediting it - for example: Ready 2 Learn: Chris Hudson & Birmingham Grid for Learning - will leave you open to charges of plagiarism, and prosecution. | |
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