Hi all,
I am about to start the Sir Kit's Quest with a group of six children but I am feeling a bit bewildered about the whole thing! It says in the info that you need '25 punched pockets', 'acetate sheets' and 'highlighter pens' but I cannot find out what you use these for. Does anyone know what they are for? Thanks.

In my school we have just started that - but one of the teachers is running it - with nearly HALF of year 3!!! The other teacher is running a phonics scheme with nearly the other half, and I have got the top ability group, which is lovely!

I've run the quest for the last two years and I have never used these items.

Thanks for your replies.
Am feeling a more confident about starting it now. Any tips you can give me for running the programme? Thanks

I never used any of those things either when I did it and I think the best tip I can give you is be prepared to over run - the guideline times for each activity are way out if you really want to acheive the objective so it means something to the pupils. Also, display some of the finished work if you can, apart from being good for the pupils to see their work up, it stops the teacher asking "exactly what do you do in quest ?"
Have fun, I really enjoyed it once I got into it and the pupils I did it with still talk about it.

I am glad you posted this I was going to ask how people have found it. Is it worth while.We have a group of Yr 5's who have poor Literacy skills some still learning phonics, 1st 100 /2nd 100spellings would it be suitable for them?

The Quest is not for your LA kids, they need a reasonable level of literacy and reading, its for your kids that are slightly underachieving, can't remember the exact criteria, before running Quest you are supposed to run a number of tests on the kids that include spellings, reading (including comprehension and role playing). Its a bit like what springboard is for maths.

Dot
xxx

Hmmm we didnt run any tests on our 12 Year 3 children.........they were poor achievers.

My teacher has not been very co-operative at all. Only completed 3 warmup sessions. He is grrrrrrrrrrrrr. Whereas other Y3 teacher is up to week 4 now . May suggst I take it on completely and do his guided reading bit, at least I will know where i am and that it will get done.

The 3 warm ups were really enticing for kids, tho I did personalise it abit. eg 'When we come to volcano section we'll make our own with Coke and Mentos' lol

I ended up doing the guided reading bit too for the same reason.
As far as I remember to be a candidate for quest pupils needed to be either a 2C reader & 2B writer in Y2 SATs or 2B reader / 2C reader, not sure which way round.
Making the volcano bit 'real' is definitely a good idea, we ate volcanic rock too (or maltesers as it said on the packet). We also drank magic water when we got to that bit (or flavoured fizzy water as it said on the label)
I've volunteered to do it again with this year's yr 3 but there's been a lot of upheaval in the class with the teacher being poorly so I don't think it will happen unfortunately.

We didn't test our children. Only 2 of the six were 'ideal' candidates, the others were working at a lower level and this has seriously impeded the process of Quest with us over running every session and several weeks as some units have had to be extended. The four lower ability struggled with the reading, so I kept having 2 that had finished reading whilst the others had hardly started. When I did the unit on using speech marks they were all struggling to use commas in class. So the teacher used the whole of her session to go over/ teach about speech marks and I spread the unit over two weeks.

This year's Quest has been much harder than last years and at times I have felt like I was banging my head against a very, very large brick wall BUT there has been a serious improvement in some of the children's work in class.

One girl who used to struggle to write two or three lines during a literacy lesson has, this week written a side and a half of an A4 exercise book!! This included lots of correct puntuation and some lovely description.
Another boy who never punctuated his work has suddenly started using full stops, capital letters, speech marks, exclamation marks and even a question mark this week!!!

These two are the real successes work wise - ie moving up levels, but the confidence of the whole group both reading and writing has gone up and hopefully over the next few terms we will see them using what they have learnt in Quest to improve their reading and writing further.

I think it is a very good programme as long as yo have the time to prepare and complete each session, mine all lasted up to 30 minutes and even that was a rush at times.

Up and running at last - only because I've taken on guided reading part as well Kids love it and ask about it every day.

Wow Flossie that is impressive.I think some would benefit then but would run into the same problem of having to take the others who would be below the standard.

I remember looking into getting The Quest a year or so ago and was told that you had to download and print out all the materials ourselves. It was 450 odd pages if memory serves. No way was I going to do that and then also have to bind it etc. Can you now get the ready printed modules now. I've tried to get on to the publications site but it's down at the moment.

Took over Quest from Teacher/TA at christmas because they both left.
Had to back track a little because some got missed and have just finished today! We went outside and read their stories, then I sent them looking for dragon, which i had already hidden in willow dome, with the treasure chest. The kids thought it was fantastic! We had to be quiet as so not to wake the dragon. (I used my dragon from Ikea)
Hope to do it next year, have got loads of ideas.
Better without a teacher because it's easier to track and get the work done!