The move to Secondary School… made easier with video editing.
The older children always bully you (that's when they're not bunking off). They break your nose with a snowball the first day it snows. They flush your head down the toilet on your birthday, which isn't all bad as it is quite an efficient way of washing out all the eggs they smashed on your head earlier. And, of course, the school has its own ghost.
The transition from Primary to Secondary School is fraught with danger.
A 1999 study by the Department for Education and Skills reported that 40% of pupils in England and Wales failed to make progress in maths, use of language or reading - some even regressed - during their first year at secondary school.
For a number of years The Learning Centre ran a project in Partnership with Bellshill Academy's associated primary schools to give every P7 pupil the chance to come and explore the transition into secondary school through the use of Digital Video Technology.
The pupils are divided into 5 teams, each team concentrating upon a specific area of school life, these include:
- How We Learn
- Out and About
- The Arts
- Break Time
- Practical Subjects
Each team has its own area to study and its own set of digital video footage depicting contrasting images of their own Primary school and Bellshill Academy. In their teams they brainstorm the differences between the two, spending as much time listing the urban myths as they do the real differences.
With their brainstormed ideas in hand each team then writes and records their own voiceovers, editing them to their video footage of the two schools. With a little bit of fun footage of each of the team members added in for good measure the five team films are then combined to make one single film.
Of course the children have fun and yes they get a chance to do something that very few of them have ever tried before but this project is more than an exercise in digital video editing. The children are working in the Secondary school, in teams to achieve something concrete but, most importantly, they are addressing their fears about the move they are soon to face.
This project is one of a range of strategies adopted by the Academy and its associated primary schools to ease the transition from P7 to S1. Alone it cannot address all of the challenges faced by children as they make that all-important move from Primary to Secondary School but it does allay many of their real fears.
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