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It’s the Spring half-term holiday next week…

It’s half-term holidays next week, so there are no specific homework tasks, times tables or spellings next week.

Of course, regular practice and learning can still happen: reading each day, swimming, tables practice, trips to the library, walks around Roundhay Park… A personal recommendation from me: take a visit to Leeds Art Gallery -the Liberty and Anarchy exhibition is great!

All will help your child have a happy and healthy holiday!

More Moortown magic!

We subscribe to the Basic Skills Quality Mark programme – for a very small fee, we receive a ‘health-check’ on how we’re doing.  It’s a useful opportunity to reflect on our practice with someone from outside school; the assessors are supportive but constructively critical in their approach.  This week, we had an interim review visit from an assessor (incidentally, also a trained Ofsted inspector).  The feedback below is in its entirety – if there are any aspects of the report you’d like some clarification or explanation, please contact school:

• The impact of Moortown’s excellent self-evaluation, which gives rise to the accurate identification of priorities for development, and the good or outstanding teaching and use of assessment within an exciting curriculum, is high attainment and achievement for pupils in English and mathematics. Pupils enter school with levels of attainment typical of children of their age, but leave Year 6 with attainment which is high when compared with pupils of that age nationally. This has been the case for many years.

• Almost every aspect of the school was judged to be outstanding in the November 2011 section 5 inspection. An exception to this was progress and attainment in the Foundation Stage (FS) which was judged to be satisfactory. This is despite standards in literacy and numeracy skills (and other areas) by the end of the FS being above that of the Local Authority (LA) average and also that of the school’s statistical neighbours. Over their time in the school from FS to Year 6 pupils make outstanding progress. Nevertheless, the school has extensive plans in place to address the aspects of the FS which gave rise to the inspectors’ judgements. The school has taken advice on this from the LA and has invested in lengthy training for FS staff.

• The headteacher’s management of the “home-grown” pupil progress tracking system has ensured that staff access it with ease and use it to ensure that no pupils remain at risk of failing to make progress for any significant length of time. He has investigated commercially produced tracking systems, but will not consider investing in one unless it proves to be more effective than the current system (which is highly effective).

• Leaders have recently re-assessed the tracker, streamlined it, and investigated the possibility of using it for monitoring pupils in receipt of intervention strategies and other support or provision. In the discussion during this visit, the headteacher spoke of the need to monitor the progress and attainment of pupils in receipt of provision which is not designed to directly affect standards in basic skills in the short term. Examples of this are pupils who receive free fruit, or who enjoyed a visit to a pantomime for the first time. The discussion concluded that the monitoring of this type of provision may not fit into the pupil tracker and may have to be done in a different way, and may have qualitative rather than quantitative outcomes.

• The school’s current priorities for the improvement of basic skills are based on excellent self-evaluation or in considered response to national requirements.

Literacy

• The teaching of grammar is being enhanced through ensuring that staff understand the latest requirements and technical terms. After undertaking sample tests as a staff, they are confident in their subject knowledge.

• Key Stage 1 teachers are confident with the teaching of phonics and leaders have ensured that this is extended to Key Stage 2 staff.

Mathematics

• The school decided to abandon “Using & Applying Lessons” in favour of planning in opportunities to use and apply mathematical skills, knowledge and processes in daily mathematics lessons, or within lessons in other subjects. Teachers are also expected to apply knowledge of the programmes of study for Using and Applying mathematics to offer challenge to more able pupils during lessons, rather than simply expecting them to complete more examples at a lower level, or complete examples using larger numbers than pupils who are less able.

Support

• The school employs a number of intervention strategies which it monitors to ensure appropriate impact on learning and progress. In addition, the school administers a “Short, Sharp Shift” to pupils who have missed essential components of learning in basic skills during lessons. These are based on specific, focused learning objectives. Measuring the impact of this has been problematic to leaders in the school as it may not result in a large “shift” for pupils. However, it is highly likely to bring about clearer understanding of concepts and build a firm basis for future learning and (as discussed) the school should consider recording the impact of this aside from the pupil progress tracker and in a different (non-numerical) way.

• In the near future, the school will investigate “Catch-up Maths” as “Catch-up Reading” has been so successful. Also, the mathematics subject leader will be investigating aspects of mathematics learning through holding “Learning Conversations” with pupils which involve getting them to do some mathematics and then probing their understanding of what they are doing to gain insight into what they understand – and what they do not. This will inform teaching.

• Keeping teachers and teaching assistants up to speed with the requirements for the good teaching of basic skills is accomplished through external input bought from a variety of sources (including the LA) or through regular staff meetings – described as Professional Development Meetings (PDMs).

• Parents and carers are kept well informed about everything about the school including the teaching of basic skills through its excellent website. The school has recently completed videos of pupils doing calculations which will be posted on the website soon. In addition, in an effort to involve parents in supporting their children with mathematics (not as easy as for literacy), the mathematics subject leader will hold a “surgery” on the same day as an ICT workshop.

• Governors are well informed and fully involved in monitoring basic skills through (for example) book scrutiny and enquiry walks.

• A brief tour of the school was undertaken during today’s visit. Everywhere in this attractive, well-organised, well-equipped, vibrant learning environment, pupils are highly engaged with and very evidently enjoying their learning.

Moortown is a very welcoming place and everyone – administrators, staff and pupils contribute to this. I thank Mr David Roundtree for his personal welcome and a very interesting discussion.

Movie making

Year Six spent a very productive day at the North East City Learning Centre (CLC) filming and editing their theme park films using iMovie.
Staff at the CLC were very complimentary about the ICT skills, acting and behaviour of the children.
The films that the children made were great fun – Hollywood here we come!

Using a dictionary

We’ve been learning to use dictionaries.

08 February 2013

The homework this week is practise makes perfect.

The children have all got a photocopy of a script in their homework books. They need to practise this so that when we go to Allerton Grange on Monday, they are ready to perform their part of the script.

08 February 2013

We are reviewing our work on silent letters this week. The children will be tested on any of the words from the previous two spelling lists. As always, they will be tested on eight words.

Supporting your child with writing

This is the Early Learning Goal for writing. Children are expected to achieve this goal by the end of Reception.

Children use their phonic knowledge to write words in ways which match their spoken sounds. They also write some irregular common words. They write simple sentences which can be read by themselves and others. Some words are spelt correctly and others are phonetically plausible.

Here are some ideas to help you support and encourage your child to write:

• write a reply to a letter or invitation together
• write a birthday card or send a card on-line, working out the message together
• write a shopping list together
• make a message out of magnetic letters on the fridge
• read food signs, road signs advertising and labels. Talk about the purposes of writing
• add messages to a board or calendar and talk about why you have written them. Explain that the messages remind us what to do

Happy Healthy Learning

Look at all the fun we had in the front playground. It might look like we were just having fun but we were also developing all our muscles which will help us when we are writing, drawing and painting.

The Finnish conclusion on outstanding schools in Leeds

This week, we’ve welcomed nine teachers from Finland.  It’s the first visit of a project we’ve named DEVOS – DEVeloping Outstanding Schools.  The project is all about exploring what makes a school or an education system outstanding.  Finland’s education is regarded as being one of the best in the world, so it’s going to be interesting to explore why this might be the case.  Five outstanding schools in Leeds, including Moortown Primary, are taking part.  The project involves four visits (two each way) and lots of on-line discussion and learning.  This evening, we met for some opinion-sharing at the end of the first visit.

The Finns described many differences and surprises.  There were three big differences overall:

Our Finnish colleagues repeatedly talked about how positive our teachers are, constantly praising the strengths and good work a child demonstrates, so children want to keep doing well.

Second, they were surprised at the level of noise in the classroom – noise from pupils talking with each other about their learning (they were also surprised at how quickly children stopped to listen to the teacher). Headteachers in Leeds explained the noise by stressing the importance of talk for learning, which develops pupils’ confidence, understanding and engagement, and makes them more likely to be active learners, which in turn they hope will lead to life-long learners.

Finally, they remarked about how stuffy our classrooms are, commenting with some incredulity about our carpets and our closed windows (this from a nation of people who happily allow their babies to take naps outside in sub-zero temperatures!).

Speaking specifically about Moortown Primary, our visitors were especially impressed with the Year 1 class assembly, which parents attended. They praised the sense of community which this develops.

Here are some of the concluding remarks from our Finnish counterparts:

• Such a lot of energy, passion…I admire your work very much.
• We saw so many hard-working teachers who cooperate very well.
• There’s so much positive, encouraging feedback to pupils, which pupils learn to give to each other.
• I noticed you had very good leadership and staff. All heads are interested and enthusiastic, willing to develop their schools. 
• Common rules so children know what they do, and teacher is the boss in a good way. 
• You use technology much more than in Finland – perhaps you are more creative. 
• For me it was noisy in the classrooms when children were working but they stopped so quickly when teacher said stop.
• I noticed there was so much cooperation between teachers – we should do more. 
• Your children are so active – not at all passive.
• The headteachers are excellent – we’re very jealous about that. Staff are lost without good headteachers. 
• Reinforcement is fantastic – it’s something we really need to learn from you.
• There were lots of ‘yes’ messages – positive messages to do the right thing, not negative messages to correct the wrong thing.
• Classes are bigger.  There are much more adults in school.  The average class in Finland is twenty, and classes are bigger. 
• The leadership in your schools is excellent. 

Next month, Mr Wilks and I will accompany eight teachers from the other Leeds schools involved in the project to Harjavalta, Finland.  Next school year, two more teachers from Moortown will visit to continue the research.

08 February 2013

Our homework this week is Talk Time.

I can tell a story.

Children have been asked to plan a story (using the structure below) and then tell it to people at home. They will be asked to re-tell the story at school on Wednesday, when the homework is due in.  This homework is designed to help children’s story writing, which is what we’re focusing on at the moment in class.

Suggested story structure that children are familiar with:

• Beginning or Opening (sets the scene, tells a reader where and when the story is happening and often introduces the main characters)
• Middle (how the story progresses)
• End or Resolution (how the problem is solved)

In Year 1 we call this structure the Story Mountain.