The Courier

Dear Parents

Welcome to the final Courier of the half term. We have worked hard to make this weekly bulletin as informative and entertaining as possible. I do hope you have enjoyed receiving this as a sure sign that the weekend has arrived. Please let us have any feedback that you have as we continue to look for ways to improve and build on the communications that we provide for you.

I know that some parents have experienced issues receiving messages through our management system, particularly those with a Hotmail account. Some messages have been going to junk folders, so please do check if this might be happening for you. Unfortunately, it is not something we can address from our end as it relies on the filtering for multiple recipient emails applied by Hotmail.

Another good way of checking on all school communications is by using My School Portal. Please do familiarise yourself with this if you haven’t done so yet. We are planning to ‘go paperless’ with our progress reports to parents by the autumn term and this will become the place to see them. For Year 5 parents the reports that have gone out today will come home as a hard copy but can also be viewed on the portal.

Our big academic focus this half term has been on promoting higher order thinking skills, in lessons right across the curriculum. To this end, earlier in the week Mr and Mrs Webb spoke to the classes from Year 2 to 6 about this idea. We are asking the children to focus on higher end thinking, such as an analysing, evaluating and creating in their learning. A good example of this would be in my own subject geography, where instead of simply learning the names of key features in a river system we have been asking why they occur where they do and designing experiments to test these ideas out. (You can make very realistic meanders using a plastic sheet and a jug of water!)

These principles can be used with children at any age and you’ll find a version of Bloom’s taxonomy of higher order thinking elsewhere in the Courier this week. Please have a go at exploring these ideas with your children over the half term break. You can apply them to any activity and it makes an excellent brain training exercise.

Whatever you have planned for the break I hope you are able to enjoy some quality time with your children and I look forward to seeing everyone on our return for the second half of term on Monday 24 February 2020.