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Author Archives: d.railston@swsf.org

Do you love reading?

Posted on by Posted in Mr Railston' s blog, Uncategorized

Our own journey through the infants at Lucas’s school has come to an end. He’s off to Junior school now. One of the biggest contributions we made as parents was our daily reading. We have been very careful not to be ‘teachers’ at home and we do things for the love of our children… not because we have a particular expertise. In fact… at infant age, neither of us have a particular expertise! We do what any ‘good’ parent would do. Mostly READ with our children. Lucas didn’t get a Good Level of development at Reception (he’s a summer born and was prem). He developed a good attitude to learning as he grew up and he finished off at Infant School with an assessment of ‘working beyond the expected level’. He’s had good teachers and reading with them once a week. So, how did he do it? Quite simply, we have shared our love of reading with him.

As a school leader I want all children to have a successful education. The cornerstone is the ability to read! A school can come up with a million and one different enticements to ask parents to read with their children BUT in the end it is up to them! Do you value your child enough to sit down every night and read with them? I would hope that you do! If you can’t speak to us! We can help.

So… to the enticement… we have a new section on our ‘love reading’ web page! HAVE A LOOK

We’d love to know what your child is reading over the summer… Take a picture of your child and the cover of the book and post it mentioning @combemartinPS and adding the hashtag #cmpslovereading to the text. It will put their picture on our webpage! Your few minutes of fame! Let’s see how many children can post over the Summer (a time notorious for a decline in reading ability due to lack of practice).

Let’s LOVE READING!

A re-focus…

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I have been very impressed over the last couple of years with the way our children adapt to a new challenge. As with all things, we need to reinvigorate our approach to learning. The GROWTH MINDSET idea has faded a little and doubts have been cast on how accurate the YET message is… HOWEVER (it’s a big however), we never saw growth mindset as a isolated approach. We look at barriers to learning, building learning power, talk expectations, learning dispositions and individual needs when planning our learning at CMPS. This means that we can use the ‘BUILDING LEARNING POWER’ approach to identify and impact on our children where we need to the most. Getting ready for September and the new academic year we are starting by looking at concentration. As you see on the front page and on DOJO, the children have been set a challenge. It will be interesting to see how they interpret that challenge over the week and what they feed back to us. I will let you know!

Concentration – Building your learning power

Posted on by Posted in Mr Railston's News

In assembly we talked about how concentration helps us as learners. We all want to become Super Learners and concentration, absorption or immersion in a task is vital. Can you please talk about concentration at home and discuss what a valuable tool it is for life. Maybe you could show your children how hard you concentrate when doing tasks like driving, cutting…. Thank you.