Two Leeds schoolteachers are celebrating after winning a national competition that backs innovative new ideas in education.
Anthony Wilkinson and Brooke Nolan, from Parklands Primary School have received £25,000 from the Let Teachers SHINE awards, run by the education charity SHINE and supported by Tes (The Times Educational Supplement).
The grant will fund JigCom, an interactive classroom resource aimed at developing pupils’ language and communication by using jigsaws in a new and innovative way.
Research has found that pre-school children from low-income families may know up to 4000 fewer words than their wealthier peers. And the evidence shows that a limited vocabulary can have a profound impact on a child’s education and life chances.
The teachers plan to design and create an extensive range of jigsaws that will focus on enriching pupil’s vocabulary, helping to contextulise it, and supporting pupils to use it through competent sentence structure. The aim is to help more pupils to begin learning to read, write and speak with the necessary knowledge and understanding of language.
Children will be encouraged to develop both receptive and descriptive vocabulary, as well as their speaking, listening and attention skills along with many overlooked, cognitive processes. JigCom will also support their personal, social, emotional, and physical development.
“We are both really excited to have received the grant,” said Anthony. “There’s lots of work to do but we’re already off to a really good start.