Glow Meet-ing with Mrs Claus: Engaging Literacy in Early Years

Please note that this cookbook refers to Glow Meet using Marratech.  Glow Meet is now delivered over Adobe Connect which offers enhanced functionality.  To find out more about Glow Meet using Adobe Connect click here.  The principles around the benefits of Glow Meet are the same regardless of the technology used for Glow Meet.

Overview
What do you do when Santa’s too busy to talk to you? You hold a Glow Meet with Mrs Claus of course! That was the idea that Margo Kerr in West Lothian had last year.

Margo Kerr as Mrs Claus

Margo is currently seconded from her nursery post at Kirknewton Primary School and is working as the Early Years ICT Development Officer within the West Lothian Council ICT team. Margo’s remit is to provide curriculum support to the Local Authority’s standalone nurseries.

Margo administers the West Lothian Early Years Glow Group, which is open to all Nurseries and Primary schools.
Last December, Margo was keen to use Glow as part of nursery and school Christmas activities and came up with the idea of having a Glow Meet with Mrs Claus.

Context
Margo realised that in the run up to Christmas, Santa would be far too busy to be able to hold a Glow Meet with the West Lothian children, and instead decided to hold an event that would enable the children to speak with Mrs Claus.
She created a Glow Meet room within West Lothian Early Years Glow Group, as this Group is open to all of the Early Years establishments and Primary schools across the Authority and so was an ideal place for them to come together for the event.

Margo began preparations for the Mrs Claus Glow Meet by emailing the Headteachers of all of the Early Years establishments and Primary schools to let them know about the event and invite them to participate in it. She let them know that Mrs Claus would be reading a story from the North Pole to the children.

Once she had an idea of the number of establishments who were interested in participating, Margo arranged that there would be four story-telling sessions over two days – two in the mornings and two in the afternoons, to accommodate both morning and afternoon nursery classes.

As the Glow Group that was to host the Mrs Claus session had a large membership, and early indications were that a lot of schools would be joining in the event, Margo contacted the Glow helpdesk to ask them to make the Glow Meet meeting room public. This is generally necessary when a Glow Group has a large membership, to ensure all users can access the room.

The advanced planning for the event enabled Margo and others in the West Lothian ICT team to support schools in ensuring that their computers were ready to join a Glow Meet, by ensuring, for example, the machines had the correct versions of Java installed. The schools could also access the Glow Meeting room ahead of the event to ensure they were comfortable with where it was and how to join it. This meant that the event itself went very smoothly.

The story choice

"I've Seen Santa!" cover art copyright © Tim Warnes 2005.

Margo chose a story for Mrs Claus to read that was not so widely used by teachers, to avoid repeating the more common Christmas stories that schools and nurseries might already be using. She chose a story called “I’ve seen Santa” by David Bedford both for its content and its lovely illustrations (which are by Tim Warnes), as she planned to upload the images to the shared whiteboard in the Glow Meet room.

In preparation for the Glow Meet, Margo contacted the publishers of the book, Little Tiger Press, to request permission to use the illustrations from the book on the Glow Meet shared whiteboard, explaining the purpose and audience for the event. The publishers were happy to grant this permission and an acknowledgement thanking the publishers for their permission was added to a text editor web part within the Glow Group where the Glow Meet was held.

Margo then made preparations for Mrs Claus. As she herself was to play the part of Mrs Claus, Margo created a costume, prepared the hair and make up and with the help of the West Lothian ICT team, created a backdrop to act as Mrs Claus’s home to add authenticity.

The Mrs Claus Glow Meet event
Approximately 30 establishments took part in the event over the four sessions, with over 600 pupils watching Mrs Claus read the story. Although the event was aimed at Nursery and Primary 1 children, in some schools, the P6 buddies of the P1 children also joined the Glow Meet.

The story telling session provided pupils with an enormous amount of enjoyment. After Mrs Claus read the story, children were able to speak to her and ask questions via their web cam about important issues, such as what they would like for Christmas, or what does Santa eat for breakfast!  Margo (sorry – I mean Mrs Claus) was then able to relay this information live on screen directly to the elves in Santa’s workroom (ie Laura Compton, the West Lothian Glow Key contact who played the part of Alfie the elf!).

This really gave pupils a sense of participation. The whole session allowed Margo and the teachers to involve children in an activity which contributed to the following Early Level Literacy and English Experiences and Outcomes:

Listening and Talking
LIT 0-01b / LIT 0-11b I enjoy exploring and choosing stories and other texts to watch, read or listen to, and can share my likes and dislikes.
LIT 0-01c I enjoy exploring events and characters in stories and other texts, sharing my thoughts in different ways.
LIT 0-07a / LIT 0-16a / ENG 0-17a To help me understand stories and other texts, I ask questions and link what I am learning with what I already know.
LIT 0-19a I enjoy exploring events and characters in stories and other texts, sharing my thoughts in different ways.

Through the use of Glow too, teachers have had the opportunity to introduce technology to children so provide a context for the Early Level Technologies outcome:
TCH 0-04a I enjoy exploring and using technologies to communicate with others within and beyond my place of learning.

Let’s look now at some extracts from one of the Mrs Claus sessions:

Video – Mrs Claus story-telling session (10:07)

Ingredients

What did Margo Kerr need to do to set up the Glow Meet story session with Mrs Claus?
• A Glow Group at Local Authority level
• A Glow Meet web part
• A web cam
• A microphone

Although Margo’s story telling room is at Local Authority level, something similar could easily be set up within one school, with, for example, a teacher playing the part of Mrs Claus, or simply with older children reading to the younger ones.

In the following videos, we will take a look at how to set up and join a Glow Meet, to enable the Mrs Claus story telling session to be replicated and how to record and playback a Meet session to enable it to be viewed after the original event.

How to set up a Glow Meet (5:36)

How to play back a recorded Glow Meet session (3:22)

Impact
There was a fantastic response to the Mrs Claus story-telling session.

The pupils thoroughly enjoyed the experience and teachers saw great potential in the concept of having a story telling session done via Glow Meet.

As a result, a weekly story telling session now takes place every Friday morning within West Lothian, using Glow Meet. Sometimes Margo reads the story, but increasingly more often, children in the upper stages of Primary read the story to the nursery and P1 pupils who choose to join in and watch. In recent weeks, as many as 45 establishments have joined a single story-telling session.

Further details of this are in the Story Telling in Early Years cookbook.

Glow Meet-ing with Mrs Claus: Engaging Literacy in Early Years5.053