The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.

Robert Greene, American Author

An introduction from our Skills Builder Lead - Miss Laughland   

Skills Builder at Longlands

Intent

At Longlands our aim is to use aspirational language in our lessons that follow the Skills Builder ethos. We know that children can thrive within all areas of the curriculum and work to the best of their abilities if they believe in themselves. We teach the children to use language that helps them develop over eight areas:

• Aiming high
• Staying positive
• Listening
• Speaking
• Problem solving
• Creativity
• Leadership
• Team building

Implementation

Over the year, children complete project weeks where they are given opportunities to learn and develop the skills and embed them into their everyday learning across the curriculum. They understand that it is ok to find things difficult, and how they can use the skills in order to succeed. Working both independently and as part of a team, they challenge themselves to tackle tasks in different ways and support one another to enable whole class success as well as individual achievements.

Tasks often encompass careful planning, research, discussion and creating prototypes before engaging in creating the final product. Children are also given opportunities to market and promote goods as if they were in a real-life business situation.

Using and developing these skills allow children to aspire to be the best they can be as a person and continue throughout their academic careers and into adult life.

Children are encouraged to use these skills and language across the curriculum. Our topics are based around the Power of Reading books and children are able to use and develop them when considering and carrying out work both independently and as part of a team.

Impact

We will see the impact of how the children develop within lessons, in the playground, how they discuss problems both with their teachers and peers, and through their displayed work.  Through the use of child questionnaires we will gain insight into each class’s use of skills and summative assessment information will be used by teachers and will be accessed via the hub.  

At home, you could support your child or children by playing a number of games and activities. You might play the shopping game - where children have to listen and remember what items are on the shopping list. Alternatively, you may pretend to interview a celebrity at home or just engage in a conversation with your child about their day and asking them to recall events will help further develop these skills. Tell them about your day and encourage them to ask questions.

We believe that by focusing on the Skills Builder programme will support your child to be the best that they can be and will help them aim for a great future.

Here you can see a variety of pictures from different skills builder projects.