Our Happy, Healthy, Safe week was a golden opportunity to celebrate the school’s status as a Healthy School. An award we achieved earlier this term. What an array of visitors we had in school to fill our children with the knowledge they need to keep themselves physically and emotionally safe. On top of the visitors, we also had out sports days and our teachers planned additional PSHE lessons right across the week. We had the RNLI, Yorkshire Water, Just Bee, the fire service, NSPCC, road safety, police, and my old friend D-SIDE Dave. I spent a long time chatting to the RNLI chap, he was telling me all about how he is part of the underwater recovery team for the RNLI, as a volunteer. Hats off to him, as this must be an emotionally challenging job and he does it as a volunteer! He also shared how many dogs they have to rescue at sea and how many children get into difficulties because of inflatables in the water. In the last week of heat, 14 children drowned in water across the UK, with the majority of them in the North of England. Between the RNLI and Yorkshire Water, we got some important points across to the children, I believe. My eldest is doing his lifeguard training this coming week at John Charles, which I see as the pinnacle of his swimming career. Time to give something back! Both my two have and continue to swim at least twice a week, and have done since they were tiny, tiny babies.  It is so important our children can swim and know how to stay safe, feel safe in and around water. I am very excited as I am taking a team of swimmers to participate in a swim pentathlon on Monday. Some of our learners with SEND joined the Y4 swimmers this year and now get to show off their skills at their own event! I think I am going to get splashed a lot! But I will give as good as I get for sure! It will be fun.

Three sports days on Wednesday, professionally participated in by our brilliant children. Sadly, we didn’t do our competitive running races for each class as planned, nor the parent race due to the heat. Vigorous exercise to be avoided was the advice given. I love the inclusivity of our school, watching participation and how supportive our learners are of each other. Mr Popple immediately reflected upon his event and how he was going to make it even more wet and fun next year!

The awards keep coming as just last week we achieved the status of a Music Champion School. The quality of our music teaching and the array of musical opportunities we provide for our children across the school saw us exceed the criteria for Music Champion Status. To echo that, our Y6 children ended the week at “The Big Samba”, a very loud drumming workshop and performance at Pudsey Civic alongside other schools from across the city.

Mr Popple and Miss Martin had a day out this week, travelling over to Blackpool to see a school that has changed their approach to teaching Maths and moved away from White Rose Maths, which is what the large majority of schools use. At Farsley Westroyd we work in partnership with the West Yorkshire Maths Hub,  keeping us at the front of research and best practice, so we also have been trialling the new approach in a couple of our classes over the last academic year. The benefit of the new approach is that the scheme splits the tricky mathematical concepts into much smaller explicit steps, making it easier for the children to grasp and thus, we build upon strong foundations. It also gives more variation, so the children have to practice and apply their skills in different contexts, making sure the learning is not simply procedural. Anyway, apart from the fact that the school was right next to the pleasure beach, and you could hear people screaming riding on the “Big one” whilst teaching Maths, they had a great day and have made the decision that we will move to what is called National Oak from September for all classes. We are all ready a talking point across the city with other schools asking to come and see what we are up to with our Maths teaching! Leading the way I say! They did come back with a good story too! The school was beautiful inside, and had loads of resources, and we all know what school budgets are like these days, so Mr Popple pointed this out. Apparently, a couple of years ago, they were clearing out the school cellar and found an old painting. Turns out this painting was worth £300,000, which went straight into the school budget! What a find!

We had our leavers work do on Friday night in Farsley. Made me realise I am getting old very quickly, when I immediately started to moan about the price of a lime and soda and the pace of the evening and how no one ever needed to go to the toilet apart from me! I left the youngsters to it after a while and went home to watch the tennis highlights with a cup of tea! I spent a part of the evening watching the semi-final in the Old Hall anyway! 

Well, one week to go and we have some really lovely events ahead. Mr Popple has been winding up the Y6 all year about our rounders match against them, which we will win. Although slightly worried as Miss Elsworth is their coach, and she plays semi-professionally for a local team. But we have recruited Mr Fisher our guitar teacher. He goes to my gym, and he is super fit and strong! Wednesday sees our Westroyd’s Got Talent event, which again is a very exciting event across school. Mr Popple is on the judging panel, but as yet I have not revealed the other judges. Of course, we have our Y6 show, prom and leavers assembly. Mr Fawcett will be in a heap by Friday! But that is not all…. Y2 and Y6 are off to Filey, with a lot of sun cream and water, and Y2 and Y1 are off to see the Enormous Crocodile at the Alhambra! You will find me in the cellar – looking for that item that is going to make the school a million!