Posted on: January 17th 2014
Firstly, a warm welcome back to the start of the new term, and New Year! Christmas seems an eon ago already, but with exciting things going on, it’s bound to feel like that! We welcome a new member of staff who will be taking over Mrs Cannon’s maternity cover in Form 3. Mr Alderton has already joined the school and is working with Mrs Cannon until her maternity commences and then teaching Form 3C. I won’t tell you too much, as he has an introductory article in this edition of the newsletter, but we’re very excited to have him on board. Please say hello if you see him on the front door – he’s already settled in well and has a great sense of the lovely community we have here at Norfolk House.
Our inset training during our F6 Study Return (on the 2nd and 3rd January) gave the staff opportunity to think about how we develop learning in the school through personalised learning and share some innovative practice in ICT. Coming out of it, we were impressed with the level of learning and capability the children are displaying in their lessons – creating their own games on the ipads and using them to present learning across the curriculum. All class teachers requested their own mini video cameras so that they can evidence more practical and collaborative learning.
This is something that we’ve been developing over the past two years at Norfolk House and is really paying off with exciting ways of accessing the curriculum and presenting learning. I was particularly impressed when I went into Form 2 last week and saw Mrs. Holt’s class videoing interviews about their Christmas holidays. The recount came through in the answers, but what I really liked was the way that their thinking was challenged in formulating ‘open ended’ questions that would elicit the best answers. I’m sure you all remember the dreaded ‘News about your holidays’ lesson and I thought this was an excellent way of not only embedding recount skills, but developing speaking and listening and questioning techniques.
In addition, please have a look at the super displays that are around the school; the ICT display in the cloakroom from F5 demonstrates some of the apps the children are using, whilst we have other interactive displays, and one on developing higher level questioning and thinking. All in all, a very positive and inspiring start!
In other news, our Chess team beat their Northbridge House rivals on Wednesday and our Football team just missed out on a play-off position in the final of the ISA football tournament yesterday, coming 3rd out of 7 in their group.
We look forward to seeing all our parents at the various consultation evenings we have in February along with other parent events to look forward to such as Form 5 parent Maths Evening (Thurs 23rd January), Montessori House parent Event (at Montessori House on 30th January) and our parent/pupil event, which we are pleased to announce will be an International Evening on 12th March – more details to follow soon.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed now that the weather holds throughout this half term and we don’t have the dreaded snow! Blue skies and overnight rain is far preferable.