Friday 16th June
Happy Friday!
Well, this week has certainly been a hot one! We are very impressed with how our children, and the adults, have coped with the heat. Thank you to all the parents who have ensured that their children are well-equipped for the heat - we have seen a variety of awesome sun hats!
This week we have been hosting Sounds~Write training. With six staff from Olive Hill attending: Miss Walters, Miss Frost, Miss Saleh, Miss Richardson, Miss Homer and Miss Grasby. The learning around reading development has been intensive, but very interesting. We know that Sounds~Write has had a huge impact on the reading outcomes for our younger children and this has been really evident in year one this week. This week, year one have completed their phonics screening and we are so proud of them all. Mrs White, Miss Hackett, Mrs Parker and Mrs Aziz have not stopped smiling. In the phonics screening the children have to read a range of words, both real words and nonsense words, to demonstrate their skills of segmenting and blending. A big pat on the back to everyone in year one!
On Tuesday of this week, we had our Peer Review. At Stour Vale, each of the schools has an annual Peer Review. The individual school will decide on an aspect of school practice that they would like reviewing, and then a team of people from other schools carry out the review. For us, we wanted to evaluate our approach to supporting our children who are not yet meeting age-related expectations. Our review team consisted of Mr Johnston, our executive lead; Miss Walters, who you all know; Mr Rawlings, headteacher at Quarry Bank Primary; Mrs Bushall, deputy headteacher at Northfield Road; Ms Jackson, parent governor at Olive Hill; and Mr Shackleton, headteacher of Oldbury Academy. The review team spent the day meeting with staff and observing the children’s learning. At the end of day we received some feedback from the review team, and here is a taster of what they had to say:
high quality teaching is evident across the school;
there is lots in place to support children to maintain high expectaions of behaviour;
children are ready to learn;
children are a credit to the school;
children are confident when talking about the feedback in their books and what it means;
there is a consistency of learning across the school, and in parallell classes;
there is a consistent understanding from all staff regarding why we do what we do;
our teaching assistants have a wealth of expertise and this is used well to support learning.
Also on Tuesday, we had our welcome evening for our new reception intake. Some of our year six children made excellent hosts and provided an in depth tour of the school. It was great to meet so many new parents and to start building relationships.
It is time to sign off for the weekend. The weather has been very beautiful this week, but for most of us here at Olive Hill we have been looking at it through our windows. Watch it rain over the weekend!
Have a lovely weekend.