In Miss Partridge’s class

What can stop us from focusing?

In class this afternoon, I gave the children 4 different Brain Busting puzzles.

For activity 1, I played some Pop music on my iPod dock really loud (I chose a song the children would know the words to so that they would be singing loudly).

For the second activity, the children were working quietly. Mr Pooley came in and told me that the disco had been cancelled. Some of the children heard this and were soon talking about it and the news spread like wildfire!

Of course the disco wasn’t really cancelled, but Mr Pooley’s fantastic acting skills had the children fooled!

For the next activity, I played some classical music.

I could see that for some children this helped them to focus and they enjoyed having the music quietly in the background.

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=classical+music&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=fp3wyhkOIOe2vM&tbnid=R46XxpftWQcfoM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http://classicalvermont.com/welcome-to-classical-vermont/&ei=hAF9UpjzI-i47AaV24DgCw&psig=AFQjCNF47JJS-IvZuubyHw_Qjiiay5C7KQ&ust=1384010488110210

For the final activity, I asked the class to work in complete silence. It was so quiet, I could hear them thinking!

Following our experiment, we scaled each activity, to show

how well we were able to focus.

1 10

Using everyone’s scores from scaling, we worked out the

average (using our Maths skills!)

Here are our results…

Pop Music

2 / 10

Not very easy to focus on work

Talking

4 / 10

Still not very easy to focus on work

Classical Music

6 / 10

More than half the class were able to focus well.

SILENCE!

7 / 10

Most of the class were able to focus well.

So, our results have shown that our class focus best when we

work in silence, or with very quiet whispering!