Friday 22 August 2008

Student Led Conferences

It is approaching a year since I started as Principal of Fendalton School and I am about to experience Student Led Conferences for the first time. I just missed these last year but I have been told that they are remarkable, a real insight into how our children learn. The idea behind the conference is that the children lead their parents or carers through their learning, explaining their successes and their goals while the teachers are present to add clarification on the very rare occasion where it is necessary.

I have spent time in the middle school this week, chatting with the children about Student Led Conferences and their preparations for them. It is great to witness how proud the children are of their work and how well some of them know what their next steps are. I look forward to seeing how the actual conferences run and talking to parents about the system.

Monday 18 August 2008

Olympic Games and Elephant Birds

Preparing for the opening ceremonyLast Thursday, we held our very own Olympic Games! All the children took part in an opening and closing ceremony and, sandwiched in between, they competed in a wide array of sports from Welly Wanging (gumboot throwing) to Synchronised Swimming on dry land. Everyone had a fab day and I even got to dress up as a Greek God for my role in the opening ceremony.

This week is book week and it started with a bang this morning as children performed scenes from their favourite books in assembly. Miranda, Rob and I then performed our unique take on the Dr Seuss story, Horton Hatches the Egg. As you can see from the photo I became an elephant bird for the climax of the story!

Book week is an opportunity for our children to read even more than usual, to try out new genres and to share their favourite stories with each other. The staff are swopping classes to read their favourite books and tomorrow we will all be dressing up as characters from some of those books. Other highights of the week will include several DEAR moments where we will all stop whatever we are doing to Drop Everything And Read.

Monday 11 August 2008

Dragons, Lambs and an Enchanted Forest!


Last week was the first week that I was able to meet my new target of spending two days a week in the classrooms. I spent all day on Tuesday and Friday in the Junior team, working alongside the teachers and children, talking about their work and sharing in their successes. It was certainly an interesting week, which included meeting a couple of new born lambs with room 4, witnessing the creation of an enchanted forest in room 3 and learning all about the Olympic mascots in room 5.

The variety of learning experiences that our youngest children are being exposed to is truly remarkable. Our children were able to show me how they use laptops in class, how phonics work for them and they even explained what a unicorn's horn is for (apparently it is a bit like a steering wheel). Rooms 1 and 2 showed me how their topic based approach to literacy was making a difference to them and room 21 shared their impressive letter recognition and reading progress.

It was great to see how quickly our youngest children have adopted the Key Competencies as their own. I witnessed children being great team players as they shared the excitement of two lambs being fed; communicators as they taught each other how to use sign language in room 13; great thinkers in room 12 shared their peer assessments of each other's work; dream makers in room 6 told about their ideas for improving the junior play areas.

There was sparkle everywhere!

It's on to the middle team next for me and I can't wait to find out what they will teach me!

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