Educational Enrichment

New for the 2010/2011 ski season is the SkiBound programme of educational enrichment. These courses have been developed to meet the demand of providing even more learning opportunities from your trip. In addition to the great benefits of building self confidence, spending time living, learning and relaxing as a group and learning a new sport, your group may also like to benefit from developing their language skills, learning about the economy of the local tourist industry, technical skills of ski maintenance, mountain safety, local cuisine and culture. To support your pupils learning, find out more about our classrooms facilities in our Clubhotels.

ENHANCING LEARNING ON A SCHOOL SKI TRIP

Embedding Personal Learning and Thinking Skills (PLTS) as part of school trip.

PLTS:

Independent enquirers
Creative thinkers
Reflective learners
Team workers
Self management
Effective participators

Aim

To develop pupil’s PLTS and to transfer learning across different contexts.

Putting PLT’s in a ski school trip context                                               

An example of Effective Participation can be attending ski school and participating in classes. This is one example, however there are many more. We can provide good fun evening entertainment and relevant excursions that lend themselves to developing other PLTS. To achieve this there are two main areas of work: Primarily we can help interprete the different PLTS and how a ski tour can help develop them and secondly how to implement this into your ski tour.

School ski trip observations

 A ski trip is generally not conceived of having educational merit.

Recent feedback from a Skibound survey suggests enriching learning on a ski trip can be done without comprising  the enjoyment element for both staff and student.

There is increasing pressure to provide evidence as to the worth or educational merit of school trips.

Justification of incorporating PLTS into the ski programme

New initiative of PLTS is receiving considerable attention and is one way to connect subjects or rather linking areas of learning.

PLTS are considered to be vital to the development of young people as they apply in almost every school context. The tools developed are to allow pupils to understand all things. School trips can be an opportunity to enrich pupil's learning by connecting what happens on their ski trip with key learning and thinking skills that they have experienced at school. We can help provide a ski school trip with educational merit and to create powerful learning experiences for your the pupils.

“Students will not remember the hundreds of classroom lessons but they will remember school trips” – Party Leader from Angmering School, West Sussex.

Implementing PLTS into your ski trip

By providing simple systems without adding to your work load we can help indentify and enhance learning. Even remembering to bring your gloves, sunglasses, hats, water bottle and sunscreen is an example of Self Management.  Attending ski school on time, being actively involved and encouraging peers in the class are examples of Effective Participation. Adapting behaviour to fit in with a ski class or a group of pupils adapting their behaviour to fit in with a foreign culture are examples of Team Work. Assessing their improvement of ski skills over the course of a week, understanding why they have improved is an example of Reflective Learning. The table below is an example of highlighting these achievements through assessment.

5 Always

4 Often

3 Sometimes

2 Rarely

1 Never

Certification & Self Assessment

SkiBound can provide certificates for pupils which documents their learning achievements. The pupil can add this to their personal development file.  Self Assessment can also be carried out by pupils to visually illustrate learning. This is carried out at the start of the trip and end of the journey and by doing so, it is possible to see the amount of learning that has been achieved throughout the week. We can provide the advice and documentation; the Party Leader would facilitate this process in resort.

LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES

An example of suggested PLTS for pupils on a ski trip to Serre Chevalier

Ski school          

Effective Participation

Showing confidence in themselves and contributing to the group

Listening and responding to instruction

Improving French Language throughout the week

Après Ski

Swimming         Self managers                                                 Team Workers

                        Seeking out new challenges                                Showed consideration

                        Good time keeping                                             to others

Ice Skating       Respond positively to change,                             Encouraged their peers

                       Seeking out new challenges and                          to improve

                       trying new skills

Educational Excursions

There is considerable scope for researching educational excursions for each ski destination e.g. California sciences excursion. In Europe; Paris (arts, languages), Alsace (History), North Italy (History), Alps (Geography). We can help you tie in day excursions in with the national curriculum and help enrich classroom learning.