Lyfta Impact: Foxborough Primary School

Foxborough Primary School

Making Lyfta a shared experience across the school

Foxborough Primary School runs a fortnightly Lyfta assembly at the end of the day every other Friday for the whole school. This provides a shared experience for students and encourages discussion in school; in groups, among friends in the playground and even among siblings in different year groups at home. Students are asked three questions which they can discuss with others and think about over the weekend, something they call "talk homework". When students return to class on Monday they discuss the questions that were posed and share their thoughts.

Using Lyfta to challenge stereotypes

Michal in storyworld series Secrets of the Opera

Jess is making use of a range of the 65+ storyworlds on the platform but the one that has really resonated with students and teachers so far, is Michal in the Ballet Studio storyworld from Finland. In this storyworld Michal shares the challenges he faced when he let go of a dream to be an ice hockey player and to embrace ballet. Jess was impressed to see how students both appreciated and understood how Michal challenges gender stereotypes.She asked students what they felt would happen if a man in their own family wanted to do ballet and whether it would be accepted.

"Some of them knew that it wouldn't go down very well. So having those conversations was just really useful."

JESS THEISINGER

Building awareness of different places and people

Foxborough Primary School

Jess told us how Lyfta had made the students far more aware of different countries. It is clear that their perception of countries around the world has developed rapidly with use of the platform.

Our engagement manager Noel has helped Foxborough Primary School to find links between their curriculum and the Lyfta storyworlds and the feedback from the teachers on this onboarding process has been really positive.

"The platform is easy to navigate, you don't need a lot of preparation and you can learn along the way with the class. I think it's been easy to adopt for that reason. You know, that it's not been a lot of work."

JESS THEISINGER

Using Lyfta to bring to life school values

Foxborough Primary School

The values of Foxborough Primary School are responsibility, open-mindedness, challenge and kindness (ROCK); all themes covered extensively in a range of Lyfta storyworlds. The school uses the platform in various ways to bring these values to life, through the shared assemblies and through classroom activities and displays a large map showing which Lyfta storyworlds link to each of their school values.

The school ran a ' We ROCK values day' in October to celebrate the school values. All classes did a Lyfta lesson to celebrate open-mindedness. They ran this as a 'Stay and travel with Lyfta' session', with each class visiting a different country, linking to learning from the curriculum. This was extremely well-attended and the parents Jess spoke to really enjoyed experiencing the Lyfta lesson with the children and being able to see it in action.

Using the platform in different ways for different groups

Teachers have explored different ways of using Lyfta depending on the ages and needs of children in each group. For younger learners they will focus on the sights and sounds of the 360° spaces before having a discussion on what they have seen and heard. On other occasions they use the film resources but pause and read subtitles where necessary for younger learners.

"But actually the fact that you can use it from Eyfs, all the way through. It's really good and they get different things after it."

JESS THEISINGER

Listen to what these students from Foxborough had to say about Lyfta:

Foxborough Primary School

We are grateful for our conversation with Jess because we are always keen to hear about how teachers and pupils innovate with Lyfta and use it to support school priorities and the curriculum.

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