Branston Community aCademy

Parents 4 Learning

Key Dates18th April

Year 7, 8, 9 Progress Check to Parents

19th MayYear 10 Reports to Parents

27th JuneYear 12 Induction Day

7th JulyYear 8, 9, 10 Progress Check to

Parents

12th JulyYear 8 Reports to Parents

http://www.branstonca.lincs.sch.uk 01522 880400 enquiries@branstonca.lincs.sch.uk

Station Road, Branston, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, LN4 1LH

Dear Parent/Carer,

Examination season is about to begin and so the first item in the sum-mer term newsletter related to that with some key tips/information for students in Years 13,12 and 11. Almost all of the learning processes are complete; the vast majority of our students are continuing to prepare tenaciously and with dedication and richly deserve successful out-comes.

Assessment of students’ work in schools is in a state of some flux at the moment due to changes being made to GCSE and national curriculum grading. The piece on ‘Branston Levels’ continues our dialogue with parents about how we at BCA are refining assessment systems to keep the ‘best of the old’ and retaining a coherent Y7-11 academic progress route.

The BCA ‘Learning Web’ is our collection of high quality learning resources that all students and parents can access remotely. Virtually every single student uses the Learning Web as a key part of their prep-aration for external examinations, certainly at GCSE level. Mr Holford’s article describes some of the key features of the Learning Web and in particular recent changes to an ever evolving ‘web’ of resources.

It is no coincidence that ‘well-read’ is used as a synonym for well-educated. Mrs Campbell’s article is another strand in our ongoing encouragement to all our students to read widely and read well. The correlation between students who read extensively and high academ-ic achievement is well proven. That is a fact but a rather prosaic and pragmatic one. Point 10 in the article, however, articulately describes why this is simply a ‘bonus’.

INTRODUCTION FROM THE PRINCIPAL

P BeightonPrincipal

Summer 2016

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Parents 4 Learning

The summer term in schools is always a wonderful time! Staff and students return to the sights and sounds of spring with the smell of freshly cut grass, creosoted fences, lovely blossom, the sound of leather on willow and, er……oh yes……..it’s the EXAMINATION SEASON!!In common with hundreds of thousands of 15-18 year olds up and down the country, the weeks between now and mid/late June, will have a hugely significant effect on the lives and careers of the students. As ever, we will do all that we can to help and support your young person during these critical weeks. So much of the preparation for the examinations, of course, is done at home during the evenings and weekends and your support/supervision of revision at home is also vital.

Many of you, of course, are highly successful former exam candidates yourselves and will doubtless use your own experiences to support your child. Many of you may well be involved in education in some capacity and are equally skilled in guiding your offspring through the next few weeks. The following list may therefore be a statement of the blindingly obvious, but hopefully it will be useful for some:

1. In simple terms, students should be working at home for a minimum of 2 hours each weekday evening, together with a significant chunk of time at the weekends. This really is a minimum and many will be working for much longer.2. Students should rag –rate their existing notes – red, amber, green - and fill in the knowledge gaps by revisiting topics and then discussing the content with a friend, parent or teacher.3. Revision needs to be pro-active and interactive. Simply re-reading copious notes can be very time consuming with little pay off.4. Use the Exam boards sites to work on the past papers, their mark schemes and the associated examiners reports.5. Subject staff will have identified specific learning sites for their subjects, and SAM learning is available to all and across the curriculum.6. Plan the work at home and plan when to do it. Is your son/daughter better in the mornings, afternoons or evenings? How about getting up earlier and getting a pre-school session in now that it is light so early in the mornings.7. Plan regular breaks. Few people can really concentrate for more than an hour at a time. In some subjects, bursts of 30—40 minutes may be preferable.8. Students will already have colour coded notes, cue cards and exemplar exam answers from staff. These need to be used in conjunction with the textbooks, CGP guides and internet sites.

All students in year 11-13 have been issued with their exams timetable and with the relevant revision timetable. The Y11 timetable includes significant revision sessions which staff are putting on between Tuesday 31st May and Friday 3rd June. There is also a Food Technology session on the morning on Sunday, 5th June. All of these sessions are regarded as compulsory.

Examinations

Mr A WrightVive Principal

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Parents 4 Learning

Key Stage 3 AssessmentAll Key Stage 3 (Y7 -9) parents should have received a leaflet outlining the changes to Key Stage 3 Assessments at Branston. Our aim is to maintain a meaningful, benchmarked system so that progress throughout Years 7 to 11 can be tracked across both Key Stages. Hence, our Branston KS3 Levels are mapped against existing GCSE grade criteria so that the progression between Key Stages 3 and 4 can be as smooth as possible. Staff have been working hard to produce the revised level descriptors and are now ensuring that the new levels are moderated and standardised. This is how our current assessment looks and will remain the same until September 2017.

Branston KS3 Levels GCSE Equivalent9a9b A9c8a8b B8c7a7b C7c6a6b D6c5a5b E5c4a4b F4c3a3b G3c

By September 2017 we will be ready to switch this assessment system to reflect the new GCSE grading structure that is being phased in currently. Our intention is that this is a seamless process which will require a straight forward conversion. We will keep you updated on the details about this in due course.

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Parents 4 Learning

English and Mathematics students in Year 10 are the first cohort to sit the new GCSE examina-tions and have already started the new specification. The majority of other subjects then begin in September 2016. The final subjects will convert in September 2017 which means our current Year 8 will be the first group to have the 1 to 9 GCSE grading system for all of their GCSE courses. The new structure is included here for your information.

There are a lot of changes to assessment across Primary and Secondary schools and we hope that we are achieving our aim to develop a structure that is underpinned by a solid assessment framework and understandable by all of our stakeholders. As we go through this period of change we always welcome your feedback and value your views immensely.

Mrs J TurnerVice-Principal

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Parents 4 Learning

In the last bulletin I let you know how to access the Branston Learning Web using the ‘remote access’ button on the Academy website, with your child’s username and password. I would now like to inform you of how our Learning Web is currently used by students to improve their learning.

This information may already be familiar to those of you that attended either the Year 11 Infor-mation evening or the Year 7 Welfare evening earlier this year. I hope that comments such as “Oh my goodness, I never knew they could do that!” and “I’m amazed by the resources students can get these days” encourage you to read on.

The following resources are accessible via our Learning Web:

1. Thousands of learning materials organised by subject area and containing:a. informative and interactive Boardworks presentationsb. bespoke worksheets and homework activitiesc. interactive e-learning gamesd. links to useful websites

2. Links to paid for resources such as:a. SamLearning - Centre ID: LN4BC2, Username/Password: DDMMYYXX where XX are first name and surname initials b. MyMaths – User: branston, Password: rhombus

3. The BCA Revision Web - exam papers/mark schemes from previous years.

4. Your child’s personal ‘My Documents’ area, where class work (amongst other files) are saved during lessons where computers are used.

5. The ‘GetHW’ area, where staff can save homework tasks.

6. Your child’s Academy email account, where you can see their emails.

As you will hopefully see there has been a great deal of thought and effort put into the creation and development of our Learning Web. For the 85% of students that regularly or occasionally use it from home, they report an excellent resource that helps them learn.

I hope that you will consider looking through some of the resources mentioned above to aid your child in their learning. To help you further there is a parent username and password that can be found in our ‘ParentWeb’. Please get in touch with our office if you would like access to this resource.

If you have any technical or other questions then please do not hesitate to contact me holfo-dav@branstonca.lincs.sch.uk

Using the Branston “ Learning Web “

Mr D HolfordHead of Computing/Co-Ordinator of Specialisms

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Parents 4 Learning

1. To Develop Your Verbal Abilities: Although it doesn’t always make you a better communicator, those who read tend to have a more varied range of words to express how they feel and to get their point across. This increases with every book you read, giving you a higher level of vocabulary to use in everyday life.

2. Improves Your Focus and Concentration: Unlike blog posts and news articles, sitting down with a book takes long periods of focus and concentration, which at first is hard to do. Being fully engaged in a book involves clos-ing off the outside world and immersing yourself into the text, which over time will strengthen your attention span.

3. Readers Enjoy The Arts and Improve The World: Scien-tific studies reveal that people who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who do not to visit museums and attend concerts, and almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work. Readers are active participants in the world around them, and that engagement is critical to individual and social well-being.

4. It Improves Your Imagination: You are only limited by what you can imagine, and the worlds described in books, as well as other peoples’ views and opinions, will help you expand your understanding of what is possible. By reading a written description of an event or a place, your mind is responsible for creating that image in your head, instead of having the image placed in front of you when you watch television.

5. Reading Makes You Smarter: Books offer an outstand-ing wealth of learning and at a much cheaper price than taking a course. Reading gives you a chance to consume huge amount of research in a relatively short amount of time. Anne E. Cunningham and Keith E. Stanovich’s “What Reading Does for the Mind” also noted that heavy readers tend to display greater knowledge of how things work and who or what people were. Books at home have been strongly linked to academic achievement..

6. It Makes You Interesting And Attractive: This goes hand in hand with reading to become smarter. Having a library of information that you have picked up from non-fiction reading will come in handy in any conversation. You will be able to hold your own and add to the conver-sation instead of having to make your excuses and leave. You will be able to engage a wider variety of people in conversation and in turn improve your knowledge and conversation skills.

7. It Reduces Stress: A study by consultancy firm Mind-lab International at the University of Sussex showed that reading reduces stress. Subjects only needed to read, silently, for six minutes to slow down the heart rate and ease tension in the muscles. In fact it got sub-jects to stress levels lower than before they started. Why read

8. It Improves Your Memory: In their book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf explains that “Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language “when you watch a film or listen to a tape, you don’t press pause.” The benefits of this increased activity keeps your memory sharp and improves your learning capacity.

9. To Discover and Create Yourself: In his book “How to Read and Why”, Harold Bloom says that we should read slowly, with love, openness, and with our inner ear cocked. He explains we should read to increase our wit and imagination, our sense of intimacy–in short, our entire consciousness–and also to heal our pain. “Until you become yourself, what benefit can you be to oth-ers.” With the endless amount of views and lives we can read about, books can give us an opportunity to have experiences that we haven’t had the opportunity to, and still allow us to learn the life skills they entail. Books are a fast track to creating yourself.

10. For Entertainment: All the benefits of reading men-tioned so far are a bonus result of the most important benefit of reading; Its entertainment value. If it were not for the entertainment value, reading would be a chore but it needn’t be. Reading is not only fun, but it has all the added benefits that we have discussed so far. Much more enthralling than watching a movie or a TV show (although they have their many benefits as well), a good book can keep us amused while developing our life skills.

If you just don’t know which book to buy then take a look at the Parents’ section of our website where there is a book list and links to suitable web sites. We wel-come any recommendations that either you or your child would like to make. We read a lot but can’t claim to read everything!

Please email them to me on: campbjan@branstonca.lincs.sch.uk

Mrs J CampbellVice-Principal

Books: Why Reading is Important

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