Chinese New Year this week heralded the beginning of the Year of The Dragon – the luckiest year of the zodiac. As with the signs associated with western astrology, the Chinese zodiac apportions character traits to people born during a time – but goes further, associating animals with the particular year, month, day and hour that the individual was born.

As many of the children will know, one of my recommendations for Year Five and Six children is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Made famous by less than perfect film adaptation, the epic story takes place in a world not too dissimilar from our own where everyone has an animal – or daemon – companion, which represents who they fundamentally are inside. So servants may have dogs, witches may have birds teachers may be accompanied by wise old owls!

The masterstroke that Pullman makes is allowing children’s daemon’s to remain in a state of flux – morphing between different animals to represent their attitudes at any particular moment in time. When a child is quiet the daemon may be a small, plain animal and when full of excitement and pride – a colourful exotic creature.

Working day-to-day with the personalities throughout Crown House, I do think we witness children finding out precisely who they are inside and slowly moving towards a relatively fixed personality (or daemon) which, in many ways, they will keep throughout their lives.

The classroom was decorated with traditional Chinese items and red – a very lucky colour – was the colour of the day. The children were greeted with a friendly ‘gung hei fat choy!’ and all made a good attempt at eating rice with chopsticks. It was great to see the little personalities enjoying immersing themselves in a new culture and getting to grips with some fairly tricky eating utensils.

Mr Wheeler started the assembly by explaining all about the spinal cord and what happens if it is damaged. His simple analogies with wires in a computer made it very straightforward for everyone to understand a fairly tricky subject.

He then explained precisely the sort of things the charity does to support people and give them the confidence to do the simple things that we may take for granted – from going to the shops or using public transport. We also learned about the more exciting challenges undertaken by people in wheelchairs, including climbing Mount Snowdon!

The children were extremely well behaved and asked some very sensible and interesting questions. It gave them the opportunity to understand simple things about life as a wheelchair user that many of us might not know the answer to. The assembly was an excellent glimpse into the fact that some people encounter different day-to-day challenges but can meet these with help and guidance.

Kit can be taken home on Friday and cleaned ready for the next week. It is not possible to stock a large supply of spare equipment for the children at school and it is always disappointing if children cannot participate.

This week then Mrs Clark arrived to delight Reception children in a History lesson she prepared a typical school dinner from her day of boiled cabbage and liver mmmmmmmmmm! as well as preparing chocolate pudding and mini – Christmas stockings.

Addressing individual learning needs is managed very successfully in every Crown House Classroom – we keep class sizes to a level, which allows individual attention to be higher than most other schools. Differentiated learning objectives are the norm in the majority of lessons which means your child should be challenged to the right level for them.

Sometimes, we find it more efficient to address learning concerns on a one-to-one basis or in small groups. This can be a group who just „don?t get? analogue clocks; an individual who is thirsting for a real challenge with fractions; or an individual who wants a careful refresher on inverted commas! In lower school we primarily use our class teaching assistants and reading assistant; with Workshop usually kicking in from Year 3. Children in Workshop may be seen on a one off or a regular basis (over a term, a year or all four remaining years). In future where we feel the need to support children on a regular basis within Workshop – parents will be invited in to speak with Mrs Donnelly rather than sending home letters.

Lastly whilst we increased consultation times to fifteen minutes from 10 minutes a couple of years ago it will be impractical to extend that any further. So, I again take the opportunity to remind you that we have an open door policy, so you should not wait until a date in the calendar to talk to us – if something is concerning you or you simply want more information, then, a phone call to the office or note in the homework diary will soon elicit a meeting. I strongly believe the school will progress through a shared vision, which will only happen if communication remains clear and frequent.

Other clubs not mentioned will be running as normal.