Newsletters

GHS Connect #10 Monday 15 November

From the Head

Last week at briefing, I asked everyone to ensure that you kept me informed about ‘good news’ stories. I’ve had a great response and have included some of the highlights below. Coming up, there should be an announcement each week which will remind everyone to send through ‘good news’ stories and images to an admin email address. I will then collate stories from there to share with parents and also with Will for our website and twitter feed. Please also continue to share photos and information with Will directly for Twitter, and continue to post on your departmental Twitter feeds when you have something nice to share, be it a trip, an after school club, or even just some nice student work or an interesting lesson.

A few ‘good news’ stories from last week:

• Year 7 girls won their first netball match against William Perkin. We’re not competitive against other local schools (honestly!).....but they played brilliantly and were so resilient throughout the game, with the final result at 4-0!! Thank you Suzanne.
• Sixth form debate club is up and running again, along with many other societies and they won a round against Swakeleys, at a recent competition. Thank you Jeremy and the other staff involved in this.
• Our first session of Morning Music Production Club took place on Thursday, and it was a great success. We have some very talented music producers at our school, and they did fantastic work. Thank you to Hemal and the rest of the team involved in this.
• Don’t forget to book your Christmas party ticket! I have mine but we will need more people to commit if the event is to go ahead.

Finally, as the days draw in and it can start to feel dark all of the time, it’s easy to get snappy and grumpy with each other, and forget how to be kind. Let’s remind our students of the importance of compassion, especially in the run up to Christmas. In the words of Mary Ann Radmacher, “There is no small act of kindness. Every compassionate act makes large the world.” Please feel free to share this with your tutees this week.

Mia

Monday
Normal day.

Tuesday
No meetings due to Year 8 Parents' Evening on Thursday

Wednesday 
No meetings due to Year 8 Parents' Evening on Thursday

Thursday
Year 8 Parents' Evening 4pm - 6.30pm on School Cloud. 
Year 12 Interim deadline.

Friday
Normal day.

Learning and Teaching

Spotted!

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

• Gulaid Gulaid and Sammy Ebzao using the desks for students to brainstorm and plan out ideas in GCCE Business and Psychology lessons.

• Abbie Allen supporting students to write high quality exam answers  by consolidating prior knowledge through a brainstorm task and then structuring their responses with prompts and key words. A clear bridge to independence! See pictures:

Learning and Teaching: book looks

This week HODs conducted a book look to see what experiences our PP and SEND students have been having in lessons. 

We saw lots of great practice across the curriculum in terms of scaffolding: knowledge organisers, key words and breaking down learning to support students who need extra help. 

We still need to work on:

• making our feedback more visible in books-ensure assessments are tagged in and use those Berol felt tips for marking;
• giving Learner Response tasks which genuinely help students make that next small step;
• allowing time for students to respond to LR tasks;
• Praise!

Clare and Jess have helpfully prepared some guidance on what great PP and SEND books could look like.  Please have a look at these in preparation for upcoming book looks:

• SEND book marking guide
• What should a 'good' PP book look like?

Kelly McCarthy

Inclusion and Pastoral

Happy Monday to everyone - this time next week we will be working towards our Friday off. Hurrah!

In the meantime, I hope everyone is just about keeping their heads above water. I met with Jo, one of our counsellors, last week who asked me to remind staff that she is there for you if you need to talk to her about anything. It’s a free, confidential service and she can be contacted on jmorgan111.307@lgflmail.org. 

This week is Anti-Bullying Week - students are aware of this from last week’s assemblies and will be looking at it again this week. The campaign is pivoted around One Kind Word, so if we can promote this in all of our interactions with students, especially those who may need more of a reminder than others, that would be great! More resources and advice can be found here.

Last thing from me this week is a reminder about SMHW - thank you to everyone for embracing this and making part of our teaching and learning routines. We still have a small handful of students who have not yet signed up so I am going to earmark some sessions this week to scoop them up, sit them in front of a computer and get them logged on. Apologies in advance for the disruption!

That’s it for this week - have a good week, everyone!

Lou 

Inclusion Heroes!

This week’s award goes to Henry Blake, one of our Learning Support Team - not only did he lead on the teaching of a Year 7 English class this week in the absence of their normal classroom teacher, he also carried on with Rugby Club in the cold and rain when he would have been well within his rights to cancel and curl up with a hot chocolate. Thank you, Henry!

Character strengths at GHS

On Tuesday last week, our Study Club cohort and year 10 Boys’ Achievement form had the opportunity to listen to Anthony Bennett, an ex-GHS student. He spoke about motivation and how even when we are at our most vulnerable, we need to have resilience to keep going. He spoke about having a positive attitude and always saying ‘yes’ to a challenge. 

Our students were captured by his life experiences and asked some great questions afterwards.

Also, Adam Hamida has drawn from our GHS community during form time - inviting guest speakers to come speak to the Boys’ Achievement form (10M4). Here, Harpal Sagoo is giving the boys some words of wisdom, focusing on how courage, responsibility and resilience are essential in building a strong foundation for life. When I asked Faisal what he thought afterwards, he said: “I’ve never seen our form so quiet. Mr Sagoo showed us that no matter how much you mess up, you can always do something good afterwards.”

Continue to discuss character with a focus on compassion and do always share any examples you spot around school.

Andrea and Noble