Deputy Headteacher

Christmas activities+

Dear Families,

Last week, the Leadership Team at were busy planning lots of exciting activities to celebrate Christmas as a whole-school community. I am sharing these plans with you so that you are aware of where there will be changes to the normal daily routine. These changes will be shared with students ahead of each event so that they can prepare for any differences to a typical day.

Tuesday 30 November Classes will put up decoration in their classrooms

 

Friday 10 December Christmas Jumper or Accessory Day for Save the Children. Suggested donation £1 (optional)
Tuesday 14 December Secondary Christmas talent show. (To be viewed live in Secondary classrooms, to be attended in person by Primary Department)
Wednesday 15 December Christmas activity day, including Christmas lunch
Tuesday 16 December Primary nativity (to be performed to the Secondary Department)
Friday 17 December Christmas pantomime at the Epstein Theatre or

Christmas pantomime – streamed into school

Monday 20 December Christmas party, led by KS5 students
Tuesday 21 December Christmas film morning with festive breakfast.

School closes at 1pm

Whilst we were hopeful that families would be able to attend the nativity and talent show this year, we are not yet in a position to invite families into school as a large group. We are exploring how we might be able to film these events so that you can share these iconic moments with your children.

Warmest wishes for the coming week,

Mrs Emily Tobin

Evidence for Learning App+

Dear Families,

Welcome back to another Term. I hope that you enjoyed some pleasurable time together as a family over the October break.

I wanted to take this opportunity to inform you about a brand new service that is being launched by Evidence for Learning. The company have now developed the first stage of their Parent App. This means that you will find it easier to engage with the platform than is currently the case.

The App is in its infancy and the company have approached certain schools to be an “early adopter” of the software – we are one of those schools.

Evidence for Learning have asked us to be mindful that, given they are launching a brand new App, there may be some technical teething issues along the way!

We are meeting with them shortly to find out more details, and will of course pass those details on to you at the earliest opportunity.

Warmest wishes for the coming week,

Mrs Emily Tobin

Our Assemblies+

This week in assembly, we spoke about Anti-slavery Day on 18 October 2021. It was a fascinating morning. Understandably the content of the assembly was differentiated for the students’ different ages. However I was really pleased when students in different age groups put up their hands to ask:

  • Am I safe? How do I keep myself safe?
  • Where does this happen?
  • How can I help?

These questions highlighted to me why and how we teach safeguarding at all times through our curriculum.

Other amazing moments included being given the opportunity to learn more about the topic from our students. I was educated about near civil war in America and challenged to think about whether we should change certain street names in Liverpool due to their link to the slave trade.

Your children’s inquisitive minds, not to mention their behaviour and concentration were a credit to you.

Warmest Wishes for the coming week,

Mrs Emily Tobin

Bug Club Software+

As you know, last week the teachers and I finalised our work on the adapted English Curriculum we will be offering after Half Term. As part of this discussion, we covered the importance of reading.

We also discussed the package we have purchased as a school which is available for you to use at home – Bug Club. We do, however, acknowledge that you have lots of online systems to remember how to use and that it might be easier for you to support your child with accessing Bug Club if we were to demonstrate it to you.

With this in mind, we are currently in the process of developing a training/demonstration session for you. We hope that you will be able to join us.

Details of the session, its location, time and format will be shared with you shortly via Parentmail.

Warmest Wishes for the coming week.

Our English Curriculum+

Dear Families,

This week the teachers and I have been working on developing our English curriculum. We presented our proposed plans to the English specialist at School Improvement Liverpool who was really pleased with our direction.

You may not notice too much change as families. However, the main changes here will be an even greater exposure to more genres and more texts. In addition, we will soon start reporting on how your child is doing in each of the individual strands of their English learning. This includes:

  • Speaking and Listening
  • Handwriting
  • Writing Composition
  • Spelling
  • Vocabulary, Spelling and Punctuation
  • Phonics
  • Word Reading
  • Comprehension

I look forward to continuing following the students’ progress,

Warmest Wishes for the coming week,

Emily Tobin

Assembly+

This week’s assembly was all about Harvest. We looked at different ways in which Harvest is celebrated in different countries. The students all engaged really well in working out which country matches which tradition. The older students thought about their opinions over subjects such as:

  • “What are the benefits of machinery replacing people when cutting down crops?”
  • “Why do we import so many apples when we are so good at growing them in Britain?”
  • “Is it right that we should harvest so many pumpkins just to make pumpkin lanterns at Halloween?”

The students were able to give really balanced arguments and discussed economics, geography and politics as part of their answers.

I love teaching, but I also love learning from our students and the thoughts they shared this week taught me lots!

Warmest wishes for the coming week

Twilight training+

Dear school community

This week class-based staff enjoyed some excellent training delivered from a maths expert. As a school, we have been following the CPA approach to maths for some time.

CPA stands for concrete, pictorial, abstract. It essentially means that when learning maths, students can experience the concepts “hands-on” before moving on to looking at what the maths looks like as a picture representation or in number and symbol form. A typical example of concrete maths learning would be cutting a pizza in half to understand halves or sharing out sweets to understand division.

We have invested heavily into resources so that students get the same multisensory opportunity to get hands-on with their timetables and algebra alike!

If you would like any advice from your child’s teachers about activities you could do at home, please just ask. You’ll be surprised how much maths can be practiced with a coat hanger and some pegs!

Warmest wishes for the coming week,

Mrs Emily Tobin

Welcome back+

Dear Families

I am delighted to be writing my first newsletter of the academic year. I hope you all enjoyed plenty of lovely moments over the summer holidays.

Next week will be National Teaching Assistants Day (16 September). In school we are busy planning how we will celebrate this day and say thank you to those colleagues who work tirelessly and patiently to support our wonderful students. Class teams will lead activities which will combine the opportunity to think about the job that their support staff do with hands-on learning from a variety of curriculum areas.

I know you will join me in saying a huge thank you to all of our amazing Teaching Assistants for everything they do.

Warmest wishes for the coming week,

Mrs E Tobin

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