Jamie Oliver on food

Needles and haystacks?

Hooray for Roald Dahl

We’ve been rereading ‘The Twits’ and the BFG this half term. Dipped into Matilda and Boy too.
Interesting piece by Will Self in today’s Guardian.

Tails of the unexpected
Roald Dahl’s children’s books are full of barely submerged misogyny, lust and violence. The new film version of Fantastic Mr Fox is an ideal introduction to this fabulous, cruel [...]

A class of ipod touches

Oh Lord won’t you buy me a school load of ipod touches. ( With apologies to Janis)

What happens when you give a class of 8 year old children an iPod touch each?
from Learn for Life

Pie’s (now where does that apostrophe go?) the man!

In ten years of being a late trained Primary teacher, I’ve struggled with the seemingly impossible demands of the Literacy and Numeracy Strategy. As I think I’ve alluded to before the Literacy Strategy has caused more heartache and lost sleep than numeracy but then I haven’t got A level English but an engineering background. I’ve [...]

Rose Review Conference

Early thoughts of the Primary Curriculum Review from someone lucky enough to go to early briefings.
Rose Review Conference from Redbridge Primary ICT Conference.
A video recorded at the time.

Tinkering Schools

George Szirtes reminiscing!

Teechers – a rant

Isn’t it interesting that as the statistics of exam success rise each year and as the chorus of governmental self-congratulation grows ever louder, that we now have demands for a 5-year MOT for teachers? I asked C who still teaches a day a week in school what she thought of this. She [...]

Capita about to get the chop!

Labour to junk Tony Blair’s flagship school reform
Headteachers to get more powers as era of centralised control ends
Farewell then the Numeracy and Literacy Strategy, all the heartache and disillusion these strategies have caused. For me the Literacy Strategy was always worse than the Numeracy, but then I’ve always found maths easier to teach. Just that [...]

It can’t be done!

Sats replacement system ‘even more stressful for pupils’
Single level tests have produced wildly unpredictable results according to two secret reports on the pilots
Warwick Mansell & Polly Curtis in the Guardian.
“Some extraordinary results emerged in the pilots, with secondary pupils consistently scoring significantly worse than primary pupils who were up to five years younger than them [...]