At our recent Board of Trustees (BOT) Meeting, I shared the Year 4-8 Interim Overall Teacher Judgements (OTJ’s) for this year.   It was very pleasing to acknowledge the improvements in Reading and Writing.   We are continuing to develop different ways of implementing the Maths Curriculum, and are working to identify what resources are needed. We shared some of the changes at our recent Parent Focus Meeting and know that this focus will have an impact on our Maths achievement.

Over the past 18 months the staff and I have been working with Andrea Piters – Team Soluctions and Trudi Francis – C21 Learning Ltd. Our focus with Andrea has been to develop the way we teach, assess, and encourage a passion for writing.  These ideas are certainly coming through in a positive way for our students.  Trudi has been working with us to build our skills when using inquiry to develop and challenge our ideas.  Inquiry learning is child centred, the learning develops with the children’s thinking.  We are working to nuture growth mindset, and provide structure to guide the learning.  One of the tools we are introducing to the children are De Bono’s thinking hats. This thinking tool guides discussions and can help us to see ideas from different perspectives.  Each hat calls for a specific action, e.g. If you use the White Hat (put the white hat on), you are just thinking about the facts of a situation, what do I know, what information do I need? I have included an explanation of all of the hats with this newsletter and would love it if you tried them at home.