The Learning Area 'Life Orientation' should be time-tabled for 8% of the total teaching time. We found that once we added up P.E. lessons, assemblies, tour, tutor periods, 2 afternoons of sport (included in the school day) and LO lessons, we far exceeded the required 8%.
On closer examination of the Assessment Standards in the RNCS document, it was obvious that most of the Learning Outcomes and Assessment Standards did not require formal teaching, nor did they lend themselves to formal assessment. Most of the Assessment Standards were life skills that children needed to be reminded of and many of them could be learnt co-incidentally in other Learning Areas.
We drew up a checklist for each grade, listing the Assessment Standards that were to be assessed during the course of the year. Each teacher has a copy of the checklist and the tutor teacher keeps a copy for each child. Ideally teachers should include opportunities to develop the skills during their lessons. An example would be an English teacher including a comprehension on compassion, an assembly on Cultural or Religion festivals occuring that month and a Maths teacher using a graph of real statistics on abuse or the spread of diseases when teaching LO 5 “Data handling”. The teacher on play ground duty may need to intervene in a conflict situation and feed back to the tutor teacher on how well the children involved responded. Every teacher tends to teach the vital skills of time management and study skills.
By the end of the year, thanks to the input of various teachers, every child's checklist should be completed (level 1 to 4) and enclosed with the final report. Hopefully in this way parents will be given relevant feedback and children will learn life skills rather than learning about life skills.
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