Total immersion Gaelic Medium Education in early learning and childcare

This resource has the following objectives:

• share how curriculum makers base their practice on high-quality total immersion in the playroom and outdoors as integral to the free 1140 hours
• exemplify leadership of change over time with effective management of staffing, resources and professional learning to meet local and national priorities
• exemplify how children and parents are supported in 0-5 recovery education to renew, refresh and reimagine
• acknowledge how the system collaborated to support Gaelic Education during remote learning and encourage building back stronger from the pandemic

Video

Key translations of Gaelic text in video (PDF, 370 KB)

Slides used in presentation (PDF, 578 KB)

Challenge questions (PDF, 92 KB)

Challenge Questions

1. What features of effective practice resonate with you in this film? How can these impact on your curriculum?

2. How well are you using the 1140 hours in early learning and childcare to reduce the attainment gap, promote equity and impact on children’s fluency in Gaelic?

3. What actions are you taking to ensure learning, teaching and immersion play is consistently high quality, both indoors and outdoors?

4. How do you embed effective and regular interactions in Gaelic as part of child-initiated, adult-initiated and adult-directed experiences that result in children being fluent in Gaelic?

5. In what ways and how well is the development of social language being supported to ensure that children can begin to speak Gaelic for real and purposeful reasons?

6. How does your curriculum promote a curiosity for Gaelic’s distinctive culture?

7. What approaches do you use well to check children are progressing in their learning? How well are you tracking that children are receiving total immersion in Gaelic?

8. What are the key features of effective 0-5 transition within Gaelic Medium Education?

9. How well are you supporting and developing parental engagement and family learning? How are parents/carers encouraged and informed so they can effectively support language used at home?

10. How are you supporting practitioners to have a sound understanding of total immersion? How well are they able to apply this understanding successfully as new publications for English medium are published? For example, “Realising the Ambition”.

11. How well does your secondary curriculum support positive post-school destinations and careers in early learning and childcare in Gaelic Medium Education?

12. What are children’s views on how their experiences at sgoil araich can be improved?