Headteacher’s Blog 13/3/15

Posted on by Mrs Finley

It’s been a fun Comic Relief Day in school with lots of children dressing up and doing ‘something funny to their faces’ for this great cause – we raised over £500 – thank you as ever for your support.

There’s been a lot going on in school this week to do with our partnerships.

As members of Aireborough Learning Trust, we have held a number of open afternoons this week for other teachers to come and see good practice going on in our school. Our focus for these events was our well established use of i-Pads to support children’s learning. Reception were using QR codes to access pictures which they then had to work out the spellings of – amazing stuff! All other year groups were involved too. It’s a learning process for us as well – all the other schools within the partnership also held open events –  so Mrs Savage and Mrs Tate visited Guiseley school to look at Y7 work to see how our Y6 work compared.

In addition, through our role as a ‘strategic partner’ of the Noctua Teaching School Alliance, our teachers have all attended ‘Teachmeets’ this week, held in other outstanding schools in Leeds. We took along our  workbooks and compared our pupil’s work with that of the other outstanding schools. Really useful stuff – we got lots of ideas and our teachers were pleased that aspects of our practice were highlighted as exemplary – particularly the quality of the children’s writing. Go Team Teanmere!

Today, I undertook a learning walk around school to see how we could improve our learning environment. I saw lots of lovely displays around school but also highlighted some areas that really needed refurbishing – particularly the Y3/4 classrooms which badly need painting. we’re looking for painters/decorators to give us some quotes – let me know if you know of anyone!

Gardening club have also been busy planting up the new planters made by Mr Brown from wood donated by Wickes – they are going to look fab! Dr Burke was able to go and buy lots of summer bedding plants using vouchers won by the school in the Leeds City Council ‘Design a Flowerbed’ competition. It’s great that something which is going to have such an impact in making the school look so much nicer in the coming months has cost us so little!