Think safeguarding, and you probably think of keeping pupils safe during school hours, within the boundaries of the school walls. Often, out-of-hours and offsite activities are not tracked in the same way. This is largely down to existing school systems not being set up to deal with the bespoke nature of extracurricular activities - but this doesn’t mean safeguarding is any less important for these types of events!
There is a lot of discussions about makerspaces and how they are used in schools. Some schools have put makerspace technology in their libraries. There are also schools that have put a piece of makerspace technology (like a 3D printer) in a singular classroom, and it's used mainly by that class. And there are stand-alone spaces...rooms/labs set aside just for making.
When we hear the phrase ‘team building’, the image of smartly-dressed professional adults reluctantly tumbling through an obstacle course or trying to construct a watertight raft on a muddy riverbank is hard to shake. We like to think that professional adults are already capable of working well in a team, and so to help make this the case, we can make the concept of team-building a much more child-friendly activity, and emphasise it in early formative years to give our children the skills they need to get on later in life. Arts and crafts are a brilliant way to encourage creativity and improve coordination and motor skills, as well as giving children the opportunity to work as teams and explore group dynamics.
The most dreaded date in the diary: the Class Assembly. When I see a note in my diary (underlined three times) reminding me ‘Two weeks until Class Assembly’, something inside me dies. 30 children stood in rows, performing songs or poetry or skits. Parents sat on rickety chairs, transfixed as their darlings (each one a future Emma Stone or Ryan Gosling) perform their two painstakingly memorised lines. Each assembly on a different topic: with a different year group, different group of children. Each assembly however feels very similar. 30 children stood in rows, benches, songs, poetry, skits, etc etc.
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