When teaching history in primary schools, our goal is not for children to learn lots of facts, although they do need to, to put things in order, but to use sources around us to find out about the past, ask questions and consider why that was the case.  An absolute career highlight this week, was visiting a new friend to us, Joan, with some of the Y6 children! 94 years young, who started at Westroyd in 1937! She had lots to say, especially about being at school during the war. We are very lucky as she willingly volunteered to join us at our heritage open day on Saturday!

We do hope you can come along and celebrate the fact that Westroyd has been identified as a building with significant architectural interest and recognised as an important part of not just Farsley’s history, but the whole of Leeds. We have a sheep-themed treasure hunt for the children to participate in, which will turn them into historians as they use different sources of evidence to solve clues! We even have real life artefacts! In the essence of Westroyd, it should be lots of fun, prizes for completion and a drink and a biscuit! Hopefully, see you at some point between 10am till 12 on Saturday 20^th 2025.  

This week we had a visit from our consultant, Grace, at the West Yorkshire Reading Hub. She comes in and supports our teaching of phonics using Read, Write, Inc. She was completely blown away by the standard of teaching by our teachers and teaching assistants and, therefore, was not surprised when we showed her the data of how well the children are doing. In Reception, Year One and Year Two we have already exceeded our end of year phonic targets! In fact, 80% of the children are working above where they should be! Which is fabulous! Miss Hollingshead is doing a super job, not only early reading but promoting phonics and reading across the whole school with strong progress being made by all.