We have had an excellent first week back after the Easter break.
On Tuesday, the teachers had a second training day on Metacognition: ways of thinking and remembering. One of the things we looked at was the number of times we might need to revisit things – to repeat things – before learning is properly embedded. This was immediately apparent to Reception staff reading with children this week and checking how many key words the children could read unaided: those reading regularly in the holidays had, typically, retained their word level knowledge from before Easter, and those that hadn’t been practising typically hadn’t. Support at home with reading is really helpful and valuable and anecdotal feedback from Reception staff is that more families appear not to be doing this.
Yesterday, I got to spend a little time with a Y3 class after they had been on a flower hunt around the grounds as part of their science work. I had first heard them in the Cutting Garden outside my office, but they had also been searching further afield across the grounds. They gathered a fabulous range of flowers and were enthusiastically sharing what they had found. The fruit tree blossom was an obvious attraction, but there were also less obvious tree flowers such as willow catkins. I wonder whether grass has flowers…?
