This week was a sporty week, crossed with live theatre! Good job we have two playgrounds, to accommodate the Rhinos and Cricket training at the same time!

I was really excited to have live theatre in school on Thursday, especially as it was very interactive. The Mountain Witch by Speedwell Dance company. Lots of improvisation and lyrical dancing. It is important that our children experience a variety of genres. Mr Popple was out of his comfort zone, but then again, he spent twelve hours on Saturday watching the Lord of the Rings Trilogy at the cinema. He does have a creative soul, just think it is emerging!

I have given out quite a few pen licences this week, Y3 specifically. When they come to my office to check if they have reached the year group standard, it really messes with my conscience. I want to make them happy, but I also have high expectations. Tricky sometimes, when I am saying you are not there yet, a number of times. I hate disappointing them. But, learning perseverance and resilience are such important skills in life, as is responding positively to feedback. Two boys in particular, have impressed me over the last few months. I have sent them away numerous times with specific feedback on a post-it note, to practice sitting their letters on the line, making sure tall letters are tall and small letters are small and that they have consistently high standards throughout a number of pieces. The two boys even arranged a sleepover in December to enable them to have time to practice their handwriting together, on their individual targets. They were both finally successful on Friday. Phew!

At Westroyd, we have a highly active, supportive and challenging governing body. When they come in for planned monitoring, I always feel excited that I get to show off the incredible high standard of teaching in our school, but also nervous, as they do their job well, and ask challenging questions to ensure we really are doing the best thing. This week they were looking at our new approach to teaching spelling, which is new this year. Mr Popple has named our approach “Nail the basics”, which we are doing and to enable our children to do this, we are promoting the children’s metacognitive skills at the same time. As teachers, we are modelling in our teaching the strategies we use to help us to learn and to remember. There are so many little ways we do this, often as adults, we don’t know that we are doing it. How often do we actually consider how we learnt other than practice? There are obvious ways, such as writing information down, saying things out loud, reading over. But there are many subtle ways we can explicitly teach children to use, when they need to learn and remember. Don’t we all use the saying:  Richard of York gave battle in vein, to remember the colours of the rainbow! I can remember in high school GCSE Maths, the teacher taught us such a rude acronym to remember Pythagoras' theorem! I still remember it now! Research by the Education Endowment Foundation shows that pupils who have strong metacognitive skills and have been explicitly taught how and what to do, make 9 months more progress than other children. Which, for me, means it is worth investing time in our teaching to do this.

I did chuckle in Y3 though. I was with our governor, Councillor Craig Timmins. The children were learning spellings, ending with al. Words such as comical, typical. Miss Martin said, “Does anyone know an Al?” One boy piped up, “Yes, I have an Uncle Al.” Then another pupil piped up, “I know a big Al, my Dad’s mate.” We all chuckled. Miss Martin said, “Well, I am never going to spell an al word wrong again as I will always think of your Uncle Al and your Big Al.” A simple, funny little way, to help the children to remember and apply.

To end my blog today, well my surgery was cancelled, which happens. It was at the last minute and due to one of the surgeons being sick. Disappointing, but not the end of the world, could have been a far more serious situation that was cancelled. On the brighter side, it meant being in school this week with the children but also with our very entertaining staff. It appears that darts are now the most exciting thing to talk about in the staffroom. Mr Popple and Mr Clough also seem to have a developing group of children that they are playing with at breaks too. (Magnet darts) It all started with Mr Clough bragging about the number of 180’s he got in a row at the weekend.  He actually thinks he has a talent and could be a pro. Which then led to us thinking about a darts name for him and even designing his shirt! So, this weekend I find myself on Amazon, researching dart boards to personally treat the staff in the staffroom. I have found myself pondering whether it matters how thick the wire is between the numbers. Do we need an electronic scorer?  There are lots of things in this profession I never knew I needed to know, and this is up there! I would like to beat him though! Forever competitive, we just need to do the risk assessment before the staff play!