- May 27th, 2010
EyePet as CfE
- bmclaren
- Comments: 2 Comments »
For a number of months I have been doing some work in and around South Lanarkshire authority, first of all with Aubrey Taylor from the Advisory Service running staff development and latterly with the support of Andrea Reid QIO in a number of primary and 
nursery schools. It’s really great seeing so many forward thinking folks in education in such close proximity to each other. A good number of schools are running their own GBL topics with and really staring to get great results from their work.
Cathkin Community Nursery
In particular I enjoyed visiting Cathkin Community Nursery which , with the support of Andrea Reid, has been undertaking a topic on pets which has included input from a special pet called “Eyepet” which comes as software on the PS3. Check the video below for a wee flavour of the kinds of things he can do..
The steps shown in the video are only a small part of how the nursery went about planning and implementing a project with Eyepet, but a case study exemplification will be produced and shared over the next couple of months.
I had never seen a GBL topic wholly undertaken in the nursery setting so I was intrigued to find out how they had gone about it. Liz Mercer the Head of Nursery was delighted with the way the project worked and how well it involved the children and their families.
“We are thoroughly enjoying our eyepets. They are part of our family now and the children have taken to them so well. Each group had adopted an eyepet, where they nurture and care for him/her. Some children have also created their own eyepet using a variety of materials. They are fab and on display in the room where eyepet lives and breathes.”
Open Doors Event
Cathkin Community Nursery then took the expertise they had gained from running Eyepet as part of their project and held an open doors event where the Early Years workers shared their experience of using Eyepet and how it tied to the curriculum with colleagues from South Lanarkshire. There were also a number of other brilliant presentations on involving parents and involving children in the planning process and digital learning books. The evaluations from this event were wholly positive and it was great to see CPD opportunities like this being provided by practitioners for practitioners. Liz and the team are real advocates of CfE, and you can see from the slideshow below how that looks in practice when undertaking the Eyepet project.
HMIE
You may also be interested in reading the thoughts of HMIE about this nursery. Their report was published today and all areas of their work were graded as Excellent and HMIE thought their work with Eyepet was wonderful.
“Staff provide a very well-balanced curriculum firmly based on play, active learning and enjoyment. High quality staff interaction, a stimulating environment and very well planned use of resources support children’s progress most effectively”
We currently have a number of Eyepets out on loan across Scotland at the moment, some as transition projects and some as literacy focus work and the pictures below are of some of the reactions of children watching their Eyepet hatch and some of the work that has come out of looking after their Eyepet.
Home School Partnership
As a follow on to that I attended a couple of parent workshops run by Colin Venters from South Lanarkshire’s Home School Partnership, encouraging parents to see the potential of their child’s use of gaming consoles as a positive chance for meaningful interaction between themselves and their child. Hear below what Colin and some of the parents who visited had to say about these sessions.
Categories Added Value, Consolarium, Consolarium visits, Games we have, Literacy, Multi-player games, Numeracy, Parents, South Lanarkshire, cross-curricular, game based learning, rich tasks
2 Responses to “EyePet as CfE”
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Mr Tait
May 27th, 2010 at 9:13 am
This is amazing stuff, I’m thinking how sketching designs could be modelled virtually with the eyepet.
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Cathkin Community Nursery Update « Interim reports
May 28th, 2010 at 10:52 pm
[...] Brian McLaren writes about their eyepet project on the consolarium blog [...]
