Welcome to the page!

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Okay, so I have returned to blogging after a little bit of an absence.  I have done this for several reasons, but mainly to sound off about what I feel is important, especially as now it seems that teachers have to demonstrate that they are learning as much as the kids.  If you read anything you feel strongly enough about to comment on, drop me a line!

Popular posts from this blog

New Year, New Ideas

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So it is the last week of the Autumn term and the school is slowly winding down towards the winter break.  Which means it is a great time to start thinking about what we are going to be doing in the Spring Term of 2018!  Already it is beginning to look like it is going to be very busy, and so any ideas that can help with lessening marking/ preparation workload are greatly appreciated. I must admit that most of these ideas I am looking at are taken from # teachertoolkit.co.uk , which is a website I would heartily recommend, along with the twitter account - I have learnt more from these in the last couple of months than I thought possible.  The site has had some great ideas about differentiation, plenaries and homework that I am already using - check out the takeaway homework menu  which we used as a starting point for developing differentiated homework options which the students love - but what I am finding most interesting is the free online resources that is out there to use. W
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Why Music Should Matter

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The holidays are over and the students have returned to school.  The planning has been done and the classes are now coming through the doors for the first time in a long while.  For some it is even longer than just the end of the last academic year as some of our classes have not had a 'proper' music lesson in over a year.  This was due to cuts in the teaching staff and the prioritising of STEM subjects over the arts.  Although it is early days of the new school year this is already throwing up some challenges as I have noticed that a lot of the students have 'forgotten' how to sing, how to hold themselves, even how to count in time.   While this is disheartening, as we have lost our schools tradition of singing, it has opened up challenges and potential in now trying to reteach the students in the 'proper' ways of singing and performing.  I have already found that some of the ideas that I learnt in San Francisco are helping - the opportunity to perform thei
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Why I Don’t Mind Failing

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Last weekend I attempted to make ice cream for a book club meet I was hosting. The recipe I was following was from Nigella Lawson and was one that I have successfully made countless times before. For some reason this time it didn’t work with the cream splitting, leaving me with home-made butter and whey that had a distinctly minty orange flavour. Staring failure in the face I made a decision just see what would happen if I froze the whey and use the butter in some other recipes.  This led me to make some orange and mint flavoured scones , orange and mint frozen whey and cartons full of orange and mint caramel popcorn for a friend’s barbecue…. Joshua Morris in a recent tes.com article comments on how we have perhaps become too concerned with success and do not allow our students the option of failing. With the now obsessive culture of school, teacher and student success we are at the stage where everybody is scared to get things wrong. I have recently seen this myself at school w
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