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Keep up to date with all the latest news happening in school at the moment.
What an exciting week of learning we have had! It has been multicultural week in school and each Class has explored another country and learned through different subjects to start to explore the cultures from those places. This week I have seen some imaginative role-play of canoe fishing in Class 1 to retell the New Zealand Maori story of how the North Island was formed. Class 2 have been dancing the ‘Cha-cha-cha’ whilst learning about Cuba. Class 3 have cooked and eaten Pad-Thai to learn about Thailand. Class 4 have enjoyed learning about how sarees are worn from a visitor, Sandhya Banerjee, who said that the “kids were absolutely lovely and a huge thank you to Harrison for being my gorgeous model”, as part of their exploration of the culture of Pakistan.
We often try to get children to share their learning with each other – it’s one of the powerful (positive) effects of peer pressure which really develops learning. Class 4 held a science fair yesterday which they invited Class 3 children to. Class 4 have been learning about forces and set up lots of hands-on demos for Class 3s to try out. Class 3 were really excited by this and they learned lots about forces. For Class 4, the act of having to talk about learning means you refine ideas in order to communicate; developing learning. This is a key principle of how we design our school curriculum – that learning in a social context is more powerful!
It is Children’s Mental Health Week this week and we have deliberately discussed this with the children throughout assemblies and in class. We have explored how to be healthy you need physical health, balanced diet and mental health. We have used a few youtube clips exploring these themes, especially how our mental health changes, as our physical health does, and that we can do things to help try and improve it – talking and sharing with friends, asking for help, exercise and self-help techniques. We have explored a few mindfulness activities such as active listening – in fact at lunchtime we have used mindfulness clips of animals and soothing images with calming music. You may also be interested to find out more about how we approach mental health and wellbeing for all and our school Governors have recently created a new policy on this subject – this can be found on our website (Our Curriculum>Mental Health & Wellbeing Tabs) as well as lots of information about how we help children and what to do if you are worried about your child’s mental health.