Newsletters

GHS Connect #5 Monday 5 October

From the Head

Three weeks until half term with our inset day this Friday which should provide a little bit of a chance to re-charge the batteries! Everyone is doing a wonderful job of staying positive and just getting on with it - thank you. Governors have also asked me to pass on their specific thanks for everyone’s hard work at this especially challenging time. School is very different to how it was a year ago, but it’s amazing to see how we have all adapted so well.

I want to say a particular thank you to Will, Jack, Dipesh and all staff involved in putting the virtual open evening materials together. This kind of thing takes a huge amount of time and work, and in many ways, is much harder than just delivering the evening on the day itself!

I also want to thank all staff for the work they are doing around setting additional work when students are self-isolating and also setting homework on Google Classroom. I know that all of these things take additional time, but we should reap the benefits of this if we continue to do this well. Firstly, as I said last week, parents are more likely to follow the rules and keep their children off school when they are ill, if they know that the work will be of high quality. Secondly, if we can get students into good habits in completing homework regularly, less catch up will be needed. Lou will soon be launching a pilot of  ‘Show My Homework’ which will be our next step in developing further student independence. We have reduced some of the directed time this year, by removing all time for meetings on Tuesdays when there is a parents evening, and we have also built in some more time specifically for planning, preparation and marking on Tuesdays. I know that, in this job, there is never enough time, but hopefully this will help a little.

In case you didn’t spot it, our former student Bukayo Saka got a full England call up - a little point of celebration for us all, amidst all of the other challenges we are facing!

Hopefully the weather will be kinder to us this week - famous last words...

Mia

Learning and Teaching

Spotted!

A round up of some of the great learning and teaching strategies we’ve noticed being used around school recently…

> Elizabeth Ayres using fun and engaging vocabulary tasks to ensure all students participated in her KS3 class.

> Neha Palta spending her free lessons observing other colleagues in the Maths department to develop her own practice.

> Serena Hayes employing energy and praise to motivate the students in her vocational  class.

L&T: Setting work or homework on Google Classroom

Thank you for all of your positivity and feedback from the discussions around how we use Google Classroom on Tuesday.  

Over the next few weeks we’ll try and share some tips from colleagues to make the GC process easier and speedier. 

This week, from me… as I’m normally racing off to duty at the end of a lesson, this week I have been trying to set work on Google Classroom during the class, as the students write it down,    so I don’t have to do it again later in the day. I think it saves me 5 minutes every time I manage it!

Kelly McCarthy

National Poetry Day Thursday 1 October

Thanks to everyone who took part in National Poetry Day last week - some wonderful activities across a range of languages.

Have a look at some of the pictures below and also a reminder that Waterstones is offering 20% off 40  selected poetry titles for young people with the code NPD2020.

Sarah Williams

Inclusion & Pastoral

Firstly, don’t forget that this week is our second PSHCE lesson of the term - P3 on Monday! This time round, everyone will be following the programme that is specific to the year group you are teaching at that time. I am hoping that you have had a chance to look at the resources in Teacher Share in preparation, and everyone should have found the booklets they will need for the session in their pigeon holes. Let me know if there are any problems with this! And, thank you in advance to everyone for delivering the session - I will get round to as many classes as I can to see how everyone is getting on.

Tutor time on Thursday

This week is also going to give us the opportunity to see our tutor groups for the first time in weeks. We will have Periods 1 - 4 as normal, followed by lunch, and then the afternoon will be a session with tutor groups. At some point over the next couple of days I will let everyone know about how this is going to work logistically, and also send out a programme of activities for everyone to use. I have no doubt that there will also be particular things that you might want to discuss or explore with your tutees. Please feel free to do so and let me know how it goes.

Mentoring provision

I am going to be spending a bit of time this week looking at how we can build in some mentoring provision for our students. Some of you will have noticed that Tevin has been working with a small group of our students at Key Stage 3 who need some intervention in terms of their behaviour and focus. This is part of the Stepping Stones Programme, a project we got some funding for during the last academic year which needs to be targeted at the younger years. We now need to look at what we can do for our older students, bridging the gap between the work that the Year Teams do and before we get to a referral to the Behaviour and Inclusion Service (aka Scott!). Starting this week, I will also be meeting regularly with the School Counselling Partnership, who are going to be starting with us after half-term. As soon as those plans are firmed up, I will let staff know.

Enjoy the slightly shorter week this week… And, if you are at a loss for things to fill your Thursday afternoon after appraisals have been completed, there’s this little document called Keeping children safe in education that I hear is a great read.

Lou Grimley

Character strengths at GHS

This week, we would like to have a spotlight on COMMUNITY and in particular respecting the GHS environment. 

“We are at a unique stage in our history. Never before have we had such an awareness of what we are doing to the planet, and never before have we had the power to do something about that.” David Attenborough 

This week, encourage students to think about how they can take better care of the environment at GHS. SHARE with us any ideas that students/forms have on how to encourage more respect for the environment.

Also, when you are out on duty, please encourage students to throw any rubbish in the bin and if you spot a student doing that please send their names to us! We are going to celebrate students who are being role models. 

Noble and Andrea