Pencoed Primary School are a fantastic Spelling Shed and MathShed Showcase School based in Bridgend, Wales.
We spoke to them to find out the impact that EdShed has had at their school.
“One of the key things we wanted to do was to improve our pupils’ higher-level vocabulary knowledge – this is where we came across EdShed.”
Our school is a co-educational, fully inclusive Welsh second language primary with 600+ pupils across 22 classes that sees children accessing learning in various different ways. At Pencoed, we have mixed, non-mixed and learning resource base year groups which access the EdShed platform throughout the school day.
We began our most recent curriculum journey with the introduction of the new Curriculum for Wales. This meant that we had to look at the how, what and why of our school curriculum. One of the first steps that we took was to establish our LLC (Language, Literacy and Communication) vision; from this, we decided that one of the key things we wanted to do was to improve our pupils’ higher-level vocabulary knowledge – this is where we came across EdShed.
“EdShed’s ease of use, resources and engaging game play has had a positive impact in our school.”
EdShed has enabled us to develop a school-wide approach to teaching spelling in a unique way that is specifically tailored to our community. For example, we have mapped the scheme with our phonics provision in lower school and work in free-flowing ‘stage not age’ groups in our middle and upper schools to ensure all children receive targeted intervention if needed. In doing so, we are following one of the key aims of the new Curriculum for Wales – supporting learners to make their own individual steps of progress.
Overall, EdShed’s ease of use, resources and engaging gameplay has had a positive impact in our school.
“We have seen school-wide whole class progress”
We are now in our second year of using the EdShed platform and we have seen school-wide whole-class progress based on standardised and averaged data collection. In collecting data for spelling using the diagnostic tool provided by Spelling Shed, we have been able to see a pattern of progress that has continued to rise term on term. This has been evidenced not simply with data, but most recently commended by our School Improvement Partner upon completing ‘book looks’ in LLC, which has clearly shown that the implementation of the scheme, in our own unique way, has had a tangible impact upon pupils’ application of spelling.
Furthermore, our pupils’ engagement with the EdShed products, including MathShed and Spelling Shed, has been superb. We see constant daily use by the majority of children at Pencoed – both at home and in school! This has led to us being able to start a school league with our very own trophy that all classes, including teachers, can win week by week – healthy competition at its finest!
“EdShed is thriving in our school community”
EdShed is thriving in our school community; the impact so far continues to grow, engagement is high and we are looking forward to seeing where the platform and scheme takes our pupils’ learning!