Greenford High School Parent Portal - GHS Connect #5 Monday 7th October

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GHS Connect #5 Monday 7th October

Mia's notes

A massive thank you once again for everyone’s hard work in making Open Evening a success. Thank you to everyone who supported in making the site look so lovely, and in helping to showcase our school as the wonderful place that it is. This year we are focusing on pride in our community and it is these kinds of events that never fail to make me so incredibly proud of our school.

A special thank you to Alex for creating the wonderful videos we were able to use on the evening as part of my talk and for filming a virtual school tour, and a special mention to Dan Oag and Manpreet, who, as usual, did so much to support the technical aspects of the event and supported Bishop in providing an outstanding musical number. Of course, particular thanks must go to Pam Lewis and to Amandeep Phull for their outstanding planning and attention to detail in bringing everything together so brilliantly.

I’d also like to thank Oumayma and the MFL department for their outstanding work for the European day of Languages the week before - there was a real buzz about everything to do with languages and I know that Oumayma and her team did an awful lot of work in ensuring it was a success.

Just a reminder that we are committed to sharing benefits for our staff. If you are still considering joining the discounted gym scheme, do take a look at the details on the VLE on the ‘Staff Extras’ tab here. You can also find details of other perks and benefits for those working in a school in this area.

Have a great week everyone,

Mia

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The week ahead

Monday
Normal Day

Tuesday
Year Team Meeting/Pastoral Time 3.15pm - 4.30pm
Post 16 Prospective Parents' Evening 5pm - 7.30pm

Wednesday
Briefing 8.15am in the library.
CPD 3.15pm - 4.15pm. Further details on VLE.

Thursday
Normal Day

Friday
Normal Day

Notes
Post 16 Subject Fair (Tuesday)
Year 13 Interim 1 due (Thursday)

Learning and Teaching - Pride in our Classrooms

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

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Hebe Westcott sets up her classroom before the lesson to ensure an organised start - as students enter the classroom, they find their do now and all the resources they need laid out for them.

Anya Munro uses MWBs in planners to create a high participation ratio through whole-class assessment.

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Waris Ahmed motivates and praises students by issuing character points for effort and contribution.

Ajit Kundi uses Think, Pair, Share when posing challenging questions that promote hard thinking. This gave students an opportunity to retrieve prior knowledge and make links between ideas before answering.

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Kyra Bah has very smooth transitions as a result of scripted countdowns and prescriptive routines for equipment and attention. These have been embedded thoroughly and remove extraneous load from the brain which supports working memory capacity.

Character at GHS

Did you know ‘Schools have a statutory duty, as part of a broad and balanced curriculum, to promote the spiritual, moral, social, and cultural (SMSC) development of pupils and prepare them for the opportunities, responsibilities, and experiences of later life. Character education contributes to this duty to promote SMSC?’ (Character Education Framework Guidance, DFE, November 2019)

This is just one of the reasons why we introduced the character strengths at GHS, but more importantly, it is to shape our students so that they are being the best version of themselves and are proud of the person they are becoming! It is so that our students are prepared for life.

It is great to see so many students in our community being celebrated for displaying Responsibility, Resilience, Community, Courage, and Compassion. All made evident when staff are celebrating them though the character points on Sims, post cards and shout-outs.

Please continue to use the language of our character strengths in lessons when you can see evidence of these. Sometimes, students find it difficult to know how they can show these strengths. Page 14 of the staff planner shows examples of our character strengths and what these look like in action.

You can log character points via Sims or Showmyhomework.

Logging character points on Showmyhomework will allow an instant notification/update to be sent through to the application and viewed immediately. This enables an easy way to forge relationships with students and our parental community.

To log character points on Satchel One/Show My Homework, please watch this 1 minute video:

Remember to toggle the 'share with parent/carers' tab so that it is green.

Please keep the positive messages coming. We love receiving and hearing them. Can I ask us to be courageous by doing two things over the next three weeks:

Earmark at least 2 students you can celebrate with a phone call home – 'Phone calls home are reported to be the highest rewards that students appreciate'.
Earmark 1 student per character postcard to celebrate this week (they do not all need to be posted; you can hand them to students as well) – 'Postcards are reported as the second-highest reward that students appreciate'.

Thank you for the positivity with our students - they really do appreciate it!

Amandeep Phull

Bright Spots

The first of this week's Bright Spots is Steve Wilson. Ajay has said: "A special thanks to Steve Wilson for chipping in as always, when dealing with tricky behaviour."

Rav has also nominated the Pastoral teams, saying: "Every single pastoral team has been fantastic at the start of this academic year and integral to our settled start - daily parental phone calls, an abundance of parental meetings, juggling duties, being fantastic at the gate in the mornings and always being there to support our young people.

A massive thank you to Ben, Rhea, Waris, Malakh, Sonia, Harj, Justine, Abbie, Shem, Joe, Hemal, Fraser, Umair, Muireann, Tia, Ajit, Buchi, Noor and Roxy!"

Amandeep Phull wants to thank Clary and Alex who have supported with the displays for open evening, as well as Kiran in repro for getting all the printing done.