“Our curriculum promotes social mobility;

we give our children the roots to grow and the wings to fly.”

Daily Dashboard

Intent:

“Our curriculum promotes social mobility; we give our children the roots to grow and the wings to fly”.

At St George’s we know that the retention of key knowledge and skills is integral to the development of our children. Daily Dashboard is a key part of our curriculum to rehearse, recall and retain knowledge, moving it from the short term memory into the long term memory. Learning in this subject is done in a range of different ways. It is designed to build confidence within the core and foundation subjects.

One of the main aims of Daily Dashboard is to improve the children’s ability to recall some really complex facts and having real enthusiasm for doing this. This is all developing children’s metacognition. It has enabled the knowledge side of the foundation subjects to be rehearsed and learned daily ensuring children have a better chance of retaining this information.

At St George’s we aim to enable a love of writing in every child and Daily Dashboard allows them to develop their confidence with their writing skills as well as equipping them to write longer pieces of writing for pleasure and purpose. Writing is obviously a key part of every curriculum and in Daily Dashboard children get to develop and use their skills in a range of different ways.

Our children at St George’s really enjoy our maths in Daily Dashboard. It is a great opportunity for them to build confidence and use the skills both using mental and written strategies. Our children are developing numerous methods and strategies in their maths lessons that they can then rehearse and become confident using within Daily Dashboard sessions.

Implementation:

Daily Dashboard is integral to all areas of learning. Links are made across curricular areas and the knowledge is built upon day after day, month after month, year after year. We teach all areas of the curriculum including maths, reading, writing and a range of foundation subjects that fit alongside each class’ planning for that term.

Every single day, all children in all classes have “Daily Dashboard” lessons for between 15 and 40 minutes. This is where children, using proven metacognition strategies, learn, practise and rehearse key facts that they need to know.  Strategies such as brain dumps, low stakes quizzes, Leitner flashcards, think pair share and others. In addition, their cultural capital is gradually built up, day by day. Separate subject-specific lessons are where they are able to learn new skills and implement the knowledge they have acquired. Slowly but surely, knowledge and skills are layered up on top of one another so that the children have a better understanding of the programmes of study.

Reading is high profile across our school and Daily Dashboard lessons enable a range of reading activities, such as short burst reading of a range of vocabulary to 60 second reads and questioning that goes with it. They are high tempo and effective times for children to use their reading skills.

We ensure that writing is very high profile in Daily Dashboard and the children can talk about how much they enjoy writing in Daily Dashboard that is then transferred to their writing lessons. We use a range of activities: from 1 minute brain dumps to 4 minute writes. It goes hand in hand with our Talk for Writing units and we have noticed that children are using their skills from these lessons and transferring them to Daily Dashboard, which in turn enables them to become more confident in writing lessons. It allows children to try out new vocabulary and their phonic knowledge in short burst writes. We collect word banks to support this and enrich their vocabulary across all areas of the curriculum which is another transferrable skill to all areas of their learning.

Daily Dashboard lends itself to all areas of the curriculum but no more than maths. Across the school we use a similar format for maths in Daily Dashboard. We use the methods that they know to carry out timed challenges that they are practising daily and cementing these strategies to carry forward and transfer into other year groups and settings.  Certain areas of the maths curriculum such as measures (particularly conversions and telling the time), shape and Roman numerals which may only be touched upon in one or two units in a year can be regularly revisited in Daily Dashboard sessions and enable children to retain these facts and then apply them within their problem-solving and general maths lessons more confidently. 

Daily Dashboard plays an important role in the foundation subjects. It allows children to learn, rehearse and use key facts and vocabulary that are then transferrable across the curriculum. The children love learning these facts and see it as a challenge to know the key information that match with our subject knowledge end goals each term.

Impact:

We are giving children the roots to grow by layering up their learning bit by bit enabling them to develop a range of metacognition strategies. Children are enjoying our Daily Dashboard lessons and it is part of their daily routine. We are seeing children becoming much more confident and ambitious learners from these lessons. The children’s knowledge and skills are built up across all curriculum areas and they are increasingly able to apply these skills in other contexts. The impact of learners to recall and retain keys facts has been a really positive step that we have utilised across all curriculum areas. We are noticing the impact of Daily Dashboard across the curriculum especially in maths, writing and reading.