Raising

standards in
Learning &Teaching
October 1
st
2014

Literacy: New Handwriting Style
The teachers have had some concerns for a
time about the style of the handwriting we
have been teaching in recent years. Their
biggest concern being that as the children have
progressed through school many of them do not
manage to develop a legible, joined-up style of
writing before they move
onto secondary school.

For those children who
learn to write easily, it
doesnt really matter so very much which style
of font they are taught, as they will learn to
write well and easily anyway. However, for
those children who find handwriting (especially
the joining and capitalisation) more of a
challenge, the font we were teaching wasnt as
straight-forward as it maybe could have been.

You may be already aware from your children
that over the last few weeks we have been
trialling a new style of handwriting in school
called Penpals. Any decision to change a
handwriting scheme across a school is quite a
big one. For those children who are already on
their way to joined and legible writing, a
change well might lead to some confusion. For
this reason, we are dripping in the new style
with our older children, although in Foundation
Phase Penpals letters are being taught
explicitly.

Please be assured that no child will find
themselves corrected for using the previous
handwriting style as we appreciate there has to
be a transition process especially as for many
older children their style is now probably set
and as long as they are meeting the expected
standards of the National Curriculum and
Literacy Framework, that is fine.

Now that we have decided to use the
Penpals materials, we are currently
preparing some guidelines for parents/carers
to help you support the children at home and
will get these out shortly.

Thinking Skills Workshop
We are planning to hold a Thinking Skills
workshop for parents on Monday October 20
th

at 3.30pm with the offer of free childcare for
those parents who would like to attend. We will
be sending home invitations in a few days to
assess numbers but wanted to give some
advance notice of this. Lots of
parents are aware that we are a
Thinking School but are not familiar
with how this looks in the classroom
so this will be an opportunity to look at how our
Thinking Curriculum works in practice.

Big Maths
Last Friday we had a staff training day in this
maths strategy based around understanding the
functions of number and are about to start
using it with the children.

It has some catchy songs and fun characters
which I am very sure the children will soon be
sharing with you. We are just awaiting delivery
of the teaching materials and we will begin
using them across the school.

Parental/Carer Questionnaire
Many thanks to all of you who have already
completed it we have had a very good
response. If you havent yet done so, could you
please access it through the school website or
Facebook page? We are beginning to work
towards Investors in Families in order to
improve how we work with our children and
their families and the questionnaire will provide
us with some really useful information to make
sure we get it right!

As ever, if you have any questions about any
of these matters please just contact the
class teachers or the office - we are
pleased to help.

With thanks
Mrs Phillips - Headteacher