It’s 5.30am. and the day begins like any other – my dog Oakley, a six year old chocolate Labrador, is ready for her morning walk. She really is the best alarm clock. I’m not quite awake yet, and the thought that there will be a strong cup of my home-delivered coffee, waiting for me when I get back keeps me walking. Without time to rest, I head to The ...
Project based learning (PBL) is perhaps the greatest resource hardly being used in UK schools. Teachers are increasingly being asked to do more with less, and there’s never been a better time to reinvent classroom learning than now. Despite the mounting pressures on schools, a huge advantage all still hold is in the freedom to deliver the National Curriculum by how they see fit. There’s also a wealth ...
How can teachers go about making their pupils’ first weeks in Secondary school enjoyable? Sarah Bedwell and her colleagues use the academic year’s beginning to have some real fun and make excellent progress.
Moving pupils from Primary to Secondary school, while smooth for some, can be a fraught process for many others. Secondaries do a lot to help mitigate the issues, including transition days, information evenings for parents of ...
15 / 07 / 2015, Diana’s diary entry (EAL student, arrived two years ago from Latvia):
“In period 1 today we do History and Mr Smith asked us to write happen on the day when World War 2 start in 1939. That was quite easy, actually. It was fun looking at the pictures and writing little sentences about what went on. After tutor, in period 2, it is Maths, and we do something named word problems. They are ...
In April this year Bower Park Academy expanded their Global Vision by gaining funding through the British Council. They funded the school to travel to Lebanon and in September, Bangladesh. What our staff experienced was nothing short of outstanding!
Teachers have used phonics as a method for teaching reading since Victorian times! Look at a photo of a Victorian classroom and you will see rows of children being taught to sound out letters to make words such as ‘cat’. Move forward to the 21st century and you still see children sounding out phonemes (sounds) and blending them to read (or the reverse - segmenting the phonemes and turning them ...
This season, our Colts E football team tried something a bit different, and were unbeaten. We looked at how we trained and prepared for matches, thereby improving our performance. This season, our Colts E football team behaved like All Blacks!
Learning environments have developed considerably over the years, and are certainly more engaging and exciting than ever. Our school is not complacent in terms of progress, and we continue to evolve, adopting new, more efficient way of working across all areas of the school.
It is generally safe to assume that in the UK drug and alcohol education is almost universally delivered within secondary schools. What is not universal however is the amount of curriculum time afforded to the subject within individual schools, who actually facilitate these sessions and what they ultimately deliver.
I have been on an incredible, emotional and laughter-filled adventure this June. So that I can give you as much of a flavour of what Uganda is like and what the needs are, I will be writing a few blogs looking at some of the projects that we were involved with while we were there.
Although the exam season is very much upon us, and many of us start to see the light at the end of the tunnel (aka summer holidays), many educators are trying to begin their careers in education. For some, the spark is put out before they have even begun.
In my NQT year I attended a three day TEACCH autism course. This covered the TEACCH approach research and values with both the theoretical and practical examples of their structured teach. The part I was most interested in was how to implement a highly-structured visual approach for individuals and groups. Now as all teachers know, you cannot take an approach that works in one school and shoehorn it into another ...
