kathleen.johnston

Today I was working with P5/6 and they were producing graphs using the Appleworks spreadsheet facility. They had carried out a whole school survey of the children’s favourite fruits to help them with their preparations to run a fruit tuck shop as part of their enterprise topic. A couple of weeks back we did the preparation work. What is a survey? Why do you need surveys? How will a survey help with the fruit tuck shop? How will we carry out our survey? What will we do with the information once we have it? We then looked at examples of surveys and how they are used in real life. One of the most obvious for us was the environmental review we carry out each year in school as part of our eco school duties. One of our senior pupil Eco School Committee members came in and talked to the children about how useful the review has been to improve the facilities and environment of the school over the past few years. This was meaningful to the children as they have experience of the review and improvements first hand.

 Next step was to create a table as a framework for the survey – a valid skill in the whole process. We find that Appleworks is not particularly stable on our PC tablets – Word is much better. However, we can’t afford Word in all the machines, so in the name of consistency we all made our tables in Appleworks. Lots of talk came in here about columns and rows, tally marks and appropriate formats for the tables. We created a class table using a PC and digital projector, then the children went off to make their own.

Next was the survey. The class were split up into groups and each group was allocated a class to survey within the school. The children then reported back to the rest of the class in how they carried out the survey and what their results had initially revealed.

Which brings us back to today! The children used the spreadsheet facility to enter in their results and then created a graph. Next step was to copy the graph and paste it into a word processing document to write about what information the graph displayed and how they could use it in the fruit tuckshop.

One wee guy was having real problems with Appleworks on his tablet so I tapped into the expertise of our ANST teacher who happened to let it slip that she knew a wee bit about Excel. She worked with the wee man and produced a graph and report using Excel and Word. So then they showed the rest of the class (including me!) how they did it. Hurray! I’m not scared of Excel any more!

During the plenary we discussed how we could monitor the sale of fruit using tables, tally marks and spreadsheets. I am confident that the children could now do this independently and this is an excellent opportunity for the children to see how these skills can make a valid contribution to the enterprise process.

Great to see lots of learning for everyone. From now on I am going to make more use of Microsoft Office on the tablets. It was good for me to see today that the spreadsheet skills the children have learned are transferrable – from Appleworks to Excel. If a piece of software starts acting up the children quickly lose confidence in it and are not motivated to use it.  However this is an important process for the children to experience -don’t moan about something that isn’t working right -lets see how we can fix it and if we can’t, let’s work out a way round it.