Working with Others

At Lancastrian we believe that it is very important for all children to develop their ability to work with others in collaboration as well as to develop their independence. For a number of years we have been developing the children ability to collaborate through Working with Others (WWO) and we have worked hard to embed this throughout the school. WWO is a collaborative learning approach which supports the development of skills in building positive relations and ways of successfully working with other people especially in groups. WWO is well known to many schools in West Sussex, with a 14 year track record of successful impact in learning in the early years and across the primary school phase. We are very proud of the fact that we were only the third school in the country to be WWO accredited!
On Thursday 16th November be recognised anti-bullying week and used our Working with Others skills to find out about people at our school we had not already met. We found out lots of new things and each filled a jigsaw piece about our new friend. The theme of the day was - "all equal, all different' and we thought about how we could be kind to everyone.
On Friday 15th December, we held our WWO Christmas afternoon. We worked in random groups across the whole school and got to know people who may not be in our class that bit better! We then had to make a Christmas party hat with our partner, taking turns, sharing ideas and listening to each other. The important part of this was how we worked together though, not the hat itself! Here are some photos of us in action, as well as our WWO champions of the afternoon! Well done everyone!
Our Easter WWO event
We worked once again in random groups...this time our challenge was to create an Easter basket and an Easter bonnet with a partner-but we weren't allowed to make one item each, we had to work together on both! There was a big surprise for us at the end when we were sharing our learning, and finding out who our WWO champions were...the Easter Bunny was in school! Not only did he come to congratulate us on how well we collaborated together, but he'd left Easter eggs for us to find in our classrooms. We were very excited! 
A big thank you to the 'Friends' of Lancastrian for organising the gift the Easter Bunny delivered to us all...