Sums and sentences - Adrian Blunt and the restaurant, wine and bar team

Yesterday, managed to get to two sessions of the CPIT literacy / numeracy month sessions.

First up, question and answer in the classroom - measurement calculations with Adrian Blunt, maths teacher.

Adrian introduced the use of mini white boards in conjunction with measurement and estimation. answers students put on to the mini white boards, reveal much to the tutor as every student needs to provide an answer. Students who are struggling, have misconceptions or who are reluctant to answer need to provide input. Generally, better to have two students to maximise peer learning effects.

When asking students to estimate measurements, provide benchmarks. For example a litre of milk or a kilo of sugar. Encouraging students to verbalize concepts means they have to either rationalise or challenge their original understanding or to adopt new ideas that have been discussed.

In the evening, the some of the award winning Restaurant, Wine and Bar team present on embedding literacy and numeracy as a team: how we work together mapping the demands. The team worked togehter to map the rwbs programme literacy demands so that everyone understood what was required of students by the programme.

Katy Fortescue in wine studies starts with what students already know and then provides opportunities to decode contextualised literacy - e.g. NZ and international wine labels, language used by wine reviewers to move on to wine technical specifications. Then, make connections to text using practical wine tasting sessions.

In restaurant studies, Francie Oberg-Nordt presents on applied learning strategies to help students identify learning styles and identity strategies students can use to assist with their own learning. tutors try to match teaching with identified learning styles, what they know and what works best for them.
eventually students critique their original learning styles orientation and also apply what they learnt via students participating in small teaching sessions amongst their peers.
in reading texts for practical purposes, contextualised readings are used to build literacy skills in predicting, scanning, skimming, IDkey works, identify tenses, increase / widen vocabulary, identifies prior knowledge and reading / writing issues. Reading activities include programme handboook, menus and recipes and Zest article on Rotherham's restaurant.

Katrina Fisher provided example of resources on Moodle to help students learn how to steam milk for coffee. A good example of using multimedia / multi-literacies to revise, affirm text literacies.