Living and Learning: 8Rs for learning

Friday 17 September 2021

During our Living and Learning lesson this week, we looked at the 8Rs for learning. The children had some great ideas of how they show the 8Rs in school and we recorded some for our Living and Learning classroom display.

Lily said “We show we are ready by coming in from break time and sitting smartly on the carpet”.

Chloe said “We reflect by thinking about something we have done before”.

Christian said “We take risks by putting our hand up and having a guess”.

These are our 8Rs for learning:

Risk taking

Talk about the difference between a safe and unsafe risk. At school, we want your child to take a safe risk by having a go at answering, even if unsure; trying something new and attempting harder learning.

Responsibility

Provide time and space at home so your child is able to organise themselves: their PE kit, reading book, homework, spellings and tables… Don’t organise everything for them!

Responding

This could be responding to their teacher in class or responding to feedback in their learning.

Ready

Make sure your child is at school on time for a prompt start.
Make sure your child has had plenty of sleep so they are alert and ready to learn at all times.
Encourage your child to ask lots of questions – that shows they want to learn!

Resourceful

Encourage your child to be organised so they can play with a range of different toys.
Encourage your child to try new ways to solve a tricky problem.

Resilience

Encourage your child to keep going! Set a tricky challenge or puzzle for your child to do.
Encourage your child to think of different ways of doing things.
Don’t let your child win when they play a game – they need to experience losing, too!
Celebrate mistakes as opportunities to learn – be happy that your child found some learning hard and encourage them to ‘bounce back’ and learn from the experience.

Remember

Make sure they have time to learn spellings and times tables – a little practice daily is best.
Play memory games:

Kim’s game: show them objects for 30 seconds… can they remember all the objects?
Can they build up the sequence, ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple’… ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple and a bike.’… ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple, a bike and a cucumber.’ etc … Take turns!

Reflect

Talk with your child about what they’ve learnt, asking questions about how they learnt, why they learnt it, when they’ll use their learning, how they would teach this to someone else, what learning might link with what they’ve learnt today.