Learning Through Play

Link through to Sue's email link - Halswell School's Learning Through Play programme

Mental Health

Link to The Emerging Field of Infant Mental Health and the importance of emotional coaching.

CoL hui: Oral Language

This is the Link to Jayne Newbery's slideshow.

Here is the email from Felicity following last night's hui:

Thank you to everyone who attended last nights hui with Dr Jayne Newbury. I have attached the slides from her PowerPoint presentation. I will continue working with Jayne especially around oral language groups for N.E children who enter school with delayed oral language skills. If you would like to find out more best practice info about oral language groups please let me know. If you didn't manage to make it to the hui last night the PowerPoint has some very thought/ conversation provoking research around oral language which you may like to discuss at a staff/ team meeting. The biggest takeaway I got from last night was the importance of maximising every opportunity to have those rich dialogic conversations with all children but in particular those children with delayed oral language, being very intentional in providing opportunities for extended conversation.

It was also great to see so many people having a look at the STAR NZ programme. I have attached some brief information about the programme as requested, I am happy to go over it in more depth with anyone who would like that. STAR NZ provides parents with strategies on how to have rich dialogic conversations around books.

Staff meeting: Writing Moderation

Assessment link to TKI, and information on the theory and practice of moderation, and possible ways of improving moderation processes.

Numicon Workshop

St Patricks Primary School in Bryndwyr
Margi Lees
Link 1 - Numicon Affiliate programme
Link 2 - 5 Easy Ways to Use Numicon at Home

Raising Our Expectations

Grant (Nicky's husband) is going to come and talk with us about raising our expectations for children with diverse needs. This will be pertinent for all children as research from as early as the 1960s shows. A pair of researchers in the 1960s ran an experiment that changed the way the world thinks about expectations. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told a group of teachers that some of their students had been identified as having the potential to become very high achievers and that these students would bloom over the course of the year. These pupils were, in fact, chosen completely at random. But when the researchers returned at the end of the year, they found that the chosen students had, on average, made significantly more progress than their peers. The impact of having high expectations came to be known as the Pygmalion effect. In Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a sculptor who carved a statue so beautiful that he fell in love with it. His adoration was so strong that the gods turned the stone into a real woman. In sociology, the term is used in reference to living up to someone else’s high standards and expectations. The opposite of this is the Golem effect – named after a mythical violent monster – where low expectations can lead to people performing worse as a result of other people’s expectations.