Posted on: January 26th 2013
Welcome to my first blog of 2013 and already towards the end of January. Time certainly does fly!
It has been a particularly hectic week with the snow coming, and ensuring that the school was safe enough for the children to attend – I’ve certainly had some sleepless nights and early mornings this week! On that note, a thank you to FoNH and the class reps for keeping the lines of communication running smoothly – everyone seemed to have all the right updates at the right times, which is always helpful.
And onto the exciting matters of school – enquiry based learning and personalised learning have been high on the agenda this week with our fabulous Form 3 Materials Museum, where parents were invited in to meet our ‘expert’ scientists who had chosen a topic around materials and had produced different projects to reflect their learning; not to mention turning comprehension on its head and getting the children to devise the questions, using intriguing and enigmatic pictures as a start to a topic on Mystery Stories in F5 and PP looking at different ways of presenting their learning on their topic of Houses and Homes. My Form 6 have also enjoyed doing ‘comprehension without doing comprehension’, immensely and demonstrating their understanding of a poem called ‘The Snitterjipe’ by producing some very creative responses in different genres from non-chronological report entries into a ‘Creatupoedia’ to writing fictional newspaper articles about sightings of a mystery creature called the Snitterjipe.
In between all this, I’ve been speaking to our F6 parents who are very pleased with the number of interviews for 11+ our children are getting and the F6 themselves are brimming with pride about how well they are doing in their exams; I’ve also had our Education Director here for two days from Bellevue, doing my interim Performance Management and looking at our Curriculum part of our Self Evaluation Form, all of which are in very good shape!
Visitors to the school (and there seem to have been a lot this week, despite the snow and ice!) commented, yet again, on what a happy and purposeful environment the children are in and how confident and bright our pupils seem to be, which always makes me very proud.
Lots more exciting things to look forward to in the coming weeks, including lots of Form trips and planning our parent/pupil event with a Geography focus, this year, as well as preparing for our parent consultations before half term. Busy as always, but great stuff happening!
Have a lovely weekend,Sam Habgood
