The senior leadership team and I had a very positive and enjoyable learning walk around classes last week. It is usual that our teachers constantly assess the children in lessons, and adapt their teaching to support learning, but termly we do more formal summative assessments. After these tests, we look at what the data tells us, what the children have done well, or what the common errors or gaps are and then make more changes in our teaching as a response. These changes are discussed in pupil progress meetings in the last week of term with senior leaders. So, this week, myself, Mr Popple and Mrs Hollingshead carried out a learning walk to see the impact of the changes made to our teaching, so far this term. Sometimes the changes are simple; amendments to seating plans, different pencils, or they could be more significant, such as extra intervention or targeted questioning during lessons. As we walked through the classes, we were checking that the specific provision for individuals/whole class changes were in place in lessons. Obviously, because of our talented, committed team of teachers, provision was absolutely in place. Again, it was one of those proud headteacher moments, seeing the impact of the fantastic teaching in our school and the children’s strong learning behaviours. Honestly, the focus and engagement our children have in lessons is unbelievable. An example was in Y6, Mr Fawcett was teaching about ratios in maths. He had identified in the pupil progress meeting, that some specific children don’t read the questions fully before answering them. So, in the lesson, he targeted those children to read out the questions and tell the other children what the important information was in the question. In Y5, Miss Wager was live marking during a writing lesson. She was promoting the children’s metacognitive skills, by suggesting there may be an error, but the expectation was that the pupil identified the error themselves. Which they did! "O, it is the name of a place, it needs a capital letter." In Y3, Miss Martin was observed to target children she had identified could be working at a greater depth. Her open-ended questioning, “What do you notice?” “What if…” was deepening the thinking of the identified individuals. One of my favourites was in nursery. The teachers had identified they need to make sure that there are heaps of opportunities for children to develop their fine motor skills in their play. This is part of our early writing initiative. Well, everywhere I turned, children were threading, pinching, kneading objects, strengthening their muscles in their fingers, and in exciting, stimulating ways. Threading tiny beads on to pipe cleaners to make snowflakes, painting on silver foil, with tiny paint brushes, that needed a tight grip.  Our children are so lucky, the standard of teaching is cracking right across the school!

Now, for a funny story from this week. An egg-cellent story for you, that will crack you up! There really are so many unique random things that go on at our school. I was busy planting bulbs with a group of children one afternoon. Kindly donated by Philippa’s Mum in Y5. Into the ground went my trowel in the KS1 flower beds. What did my trowel hit? What could I see? A large raw egg, buried in the compost, now with the yolk flowing out… Why would that be there???? It could not be a child's uneaten lunch or snack; was it raw? It became a discussion point around school and the only solution Google could supply is that foxes, like squirrels, often bury their food to go back to it later! Still, how did the fox carry the raw egg, without cracking it?

Shout out to our KS2 Basketball team – out competing at a high standard this week!