Christina Queen, Primary school, Glasgow
Christina has been teaching for 14 years and currently teaches P6 (Year 5 equivalent) in a two-form entry primary school in the central belt of Scotland. She’s been at the same school for 10 years.
Christina describes the school culture as kind, supportive, and based around fostering positive relationships with pupils. She highlights the way they create a safe space for pupils to make mistakes and encourage discussions about learning and improving from them together.
They believe that its crucial to ensure pupils are equipped to thrive in their future learning and work – and it’s some of these same principles that mean they focus on developing pupils’ money skills alongside their academic learning.
Christina uses LifeSkills resources that cover topics like money and budgeting with her class and finds them particularly helpful as they provide pupils with an opportunity to develop and practice important life skills which they may not previously have known very much about.
Motivating and engaging students is a key part of the school’s vision of education, and the LifeSkills resources have helped Christina deliver this objective.
The budgeting game, in particular, was a hit with the students, prompting discussions about essential expenses like heating and transport. Christina noted that when delivering the money skills lessons, “they were just so motivated – when we came to the end all the children asked ‘can we not just learn more of these lessons?’”. Crucially, she says that “we were seeing that high level of engagement from all learners, not just the usual ones.”
For Christina, building this motivation is essential – and one of the most rewarding aspects of her job. “When you get kids who aren’t so excited by the curriculum – when they get that lightbulb moment when they finally get something or are a wee bit excited by it – it makes a difference, and you feel like you’re making a difference for them as well.”
It’s against this context, and the school’s commitment to engaging pupils, that LifeSkills resources have been so impactful. “If pupils can see a purpose in their learning and they’re interested in it, that’s important. These resources have got them to start talking about these topics with their parents and thinking about being able to apply those skills when they’re older - or even now.
It’s particularly important when it comes to life skills and topics around money, because as Christina argues: “they benefit every learner because they’re all going to have to know about these topics at some point in their lives.”
Although there are lots of resources out there, Christina said that LifeSkills “would always be my go-to for this subject”. With a packed curriculum and all teachers facing so many competing demands for their time, she likes LifeSkills because “they were really interactive, really accessible, and really easy to pick up and go - and as a teacher that’s massive”.
As a values-driven educator, it’s also important to her that they were ‘really inclusive’ and “easily adaptable for our kids.”
The benefit of using LifeSkills materials is how simple they are to embed in the classroom, saving time, and also easily providing a resource that is engaging for the children. She found that LifeSkills activities are written in a way that makes them easy for her to follow, engaging, and effective at sparking her pupils’ interest. Christina believes that if she had just handed them a printout, she would have had a very different response from them.
