Hear from Amy Dewar, Year 5 Teacher at Linden Road Academy about her experience teaching in her school’s immersive classroom.
“It’s not a product you’re buying it’s a community you’re joining”
Learning Context
My Y5 children were studying Antarctica as part of their Geography topic. The immersive classroom was used to provide a context for the children to gather vocabulary to help them create poems. The intention was that having created those poems, they would perform them in the immersive classroom with the video clip as a backdrop to their performances.
The learning sequence took place across the course of a day, with the children revisiting the immersive classroom as their learning developed.
Setting the Scene
I watched the clip as part of the planning process. I divided the clip into 15 sections with the purpose of allocating one pair of pupils to each section of the clip.
Before we entered the immersive classroom, I told the pupils we were going on an Antarctic adventure…
We discussed:
- What might we see?
- What might it be like?
- Do we think it will be safe?
- What will we need to bring?
Immersed in Learning
Together, we watched the clip – the pupils were responsible for writing a poem about a different aspect of our adventure.
Pupils discussed their sections and gathered ideas and vocabulary for the content of their poem.
Back in the classroom we explored a number of poems that might help us write our own. I taught the class poetic features such as onomatopoeia, personification and similes.
We revisited the immersive classroom to look again at the video, to remind the children of their section of the clip and to connect their new learning about poetic form to the part they were going to create in the final performance.
Back in the classroom each pair worked upon their section and produced a first draft of their poem. These were then performed in the immersive classroom. After each pair performed their section the rest of the class provided critique. Picking out what they liked and giving helpful ideas to move both their writing and their performance forward.
Drawing upon the feedback they had been given and the opportunity to watch one another’s performance the children went back to their classroom to write their final version and rehearse in preparation for their performance.
Learning Outcome
The children rehearsed the performance of their poems in the immersive classroom before the Y2 children joined them in the room for their final performance.
The video created a context for the children to become engrossed in the creation of a piece of poetry. A piece they edited and developed over the course of the day in preparation for their final performance. The activity generated huge amounts of purposeful talk. The activity challenged them to produce both poems and a performance of high quality.
