Friday Bulletin – 13th October 2017

Dear Parents and Carers,

I have been fortunate enough to spend lots of time with your children this week and have now completed my termly lesson observations. This is an excellent opportunity to talk to children about their learning and is an important part of monitoring standards in teaching and learning across the school.

During the lesson observations some common strengths began to emerge. My main findings were as follows:

• Our children are increasingly confident to challenge themselves and persevere to produce their best work. Children as young as Year 1 were telling me they wanted to re-do a piece of work in order to improve a first attempt.
• Teachers work hard to give learning a context for our children. Work is often linked to the topics being studied, for example, Year 6 were learning about electric circuits by building working lighthouse models and Year 3 were practising their calculation skills on Julius Caesar’s accounts!
• There are high expectations of behaviour and rules and routines are well established. This means that children do not have to wait for others and their learning moves on at a faster pace.

As you would expect, alongside identifying strengths, it is important for schools to recognise what could be better. At Kells Lane, we feel our children would benefit from improving their accuracy and speed when it comes to number facts and times tables. Improvement in this area will have a considerable impact on a child’s ability to tackle more challenging mathematics. Please do encourage your child to use our Rockstar Times Tables maths games – why not have a go yourself!

I hope you have a lovely weekend.

Yours sincerely,

Mrs A Whistler

Headteacher

Dates for your diary for the coming weeks: