Celebrating the Teaching Profession

As we approach the end of another busy academic year, exhausted from the myriad of educational reform, end of term productions and sports days; I was asked to reflect on things to be thankful for.  

As a profession, we can at times give the impression that life in school and education as a whole is a quagmire of trauma and pain. It is far from the case, the profession is bursting with optimistic, passionate and positive staff from our school leaders plotting the most irresistible curriculum, our class teachers delivering the most inspirational lessons and our support teams nurturing the most vulnerable of pupils.  

Our year at Warden House Primary School has been as crazy as ever, here are a few reflections on another irresistible year in education.

Our year began with an announcement that our school has been accredited as a National Support School and we opened on the 1st September as a new Multi-Academy Trust. We welcomed our children into a fresh year with all the optimism and energy that a well-deserved break in August could muster.  

Our Early Years play area had been renovated with a vibrant and engaging soft play surface and new mud kitchen built by our talented Site Manager; the children were thrilled. 

In September our term begins with an Orientation Unit that focuses on settling children into their new class and routines.  We then gather together in week three as a school for Oracy Week.  

The focus for Oracy Week was The Heroic Journey. We hired an actor who took the children into a world of fantasy as they plotted a school wide story based on an ancient story writing frame. Children and staff suspended their disbelief and dressed as characters from the story and retold our shared story throughout the week. This provided a powerful springboard to our children's writing and reading across the year.

As the term progressed, we entered into the spirit of harvest, reflected respectfully on the stories around Armistice Day and brought out the glitter for our Christmas productions.  As staff, we had undertaken our appraisal reviews and shared the outcomes of our research based targets. We gathered at a beautiful venue called Pines Calyx in St Margarets-at-Cliffe to share the fruits of our research with the whole staff team during a school TeachMeet.  

The session was inspiring.  Our fifty six staff were all present and many delivered a four minute synopsis of their research. Here is a blog of the presentations. Making time to share our practice with one another is so often overlooked but offers such a powerful and relationship building outcome for our staff team.