Posted on: May 23rd 2014
This fortnight has whizzed by, with so much going on yet again both in and out of school! The children have been treated to many drama delights as you can see from the newsletter, including Form 6’s opportunity last Monday to work on dramatising their own scripts of Macbeth, written in Shakespearian language, with a great actress who herself had performed on Broadway as Lady Macbeth recently! Their final performances of their scripts were pretty impressive for an afternoon’s work and they very much enjoyed working together on this.
Popping to see the children at PGL last week was also a lovely experience; to see our pupils braving high towers to abseil and putting their fears aside to do an almost 40 ft ‘Leap of Faith’ is something that I find amazing! Notwithstanding the fact that for such young children to be away from home for two nights is a huge leap of faith in itself, both for them and their parents. It was a huge success and just seeing how much our Form 4’s discovered about themselves makes it such a valuable experience for them. I think the photographs and videos capture this the most!
In between all this, I hosted a visit from two Australian principles from Perth. Sam Fontaine and Peter Panizza were doing a ‘learning tour’ of Europe and asked to visit us some months ago. They had a wealth of knowledge between them and were keen to know all about Norfolk House. They were very impressed with the school, particularly how welcoming the children and staff were and what was going on around the school. They took away ideas and gave a few to me!
I think it’s incredibly important to share practice and find opportunities to widen our experiences. I myself visited a primary school in Birmingham this week, a maintained school that had 881 pupils on role. It was a very interesting experience and I saw some impressive learning going on and a fantastic learning environment.
After half term, there’ll only be 5 and a half weeks left before the end of the academic year; it has been a whirlwind and there’s still more to come. I look forward to sharing this with all of you, and in the meantime, do enjoy the half term.