Headteacher Blog 11th March 2022

There are signs of spring all around: warmer weather, leaf buds, frollicking frogs and spawn in the pond and a fox feeding cubs (or a very pregnant vixen mate) on the school grounds. We lost a lot of our flock of chickens on Sunday/Monday morning and these incidents almost always take place in March or April in the cubbing season. We shared this with children and they were able to make sense of it in terms of food chains and the cycle of life.

Our work on curriculum development continues apace and teachers are enjoying developing ‘Knowledge Organisers’ with and for their children. These electronic documents help us to build on prior knowledge and identify the key ‘sticky knowledge’ that we really need to retain. I was lucky enough to enter a Y6 classroom as they were introducing a new topic around the circulatory system in science, and the knowledge organiser summary of prior knowledge was a really engaging and effective start to the lesson, prompting lots of ‘oh, yeah…’ type moments and a good degree of recall of previous lessons. These documents will develop over the course of a few weeks and will be a mixture of teacher-provided content and content developed with the group or even individual pupils. Crucially, older children with have their own copies of the Knowledge Organisers within their Google Drives, and a quick search for ‘Romans’ will bring back the key learning for them in a matter of seconds. Or, at least, that’s the plan.