Dear parents and guardians,

Supporting our pupils' wellbeing is an important and integral part of life at Dame B’s. Wellbeing threads its way through our learning wheel and underpins our pastoral care. This time of year wellbeing is high on our agenda with darker nights and darker mornings and we are conscious of our ability to add light and colour through an engaging and exciting learning experience.

The Pre-Prep began this term with a very exciting thematic learning launch day when their new topic ‘Out of this World’ was unveiled. The pupils have been able to journey into space, explore the many wonders of the solar system and plan their own space explorations. As part of the unpacking of our focus on the learning habit of curiosity Reception have been investigating the big questions Nasa has posed for the coming year. They were very excited about exploring life on the space station and reenacting Tim Peake’s space adventures and were thrilled to be tweeted by him. As the topic comes towards a close the pupils curiosity has continued to be piqued as they watched with amazement the apparent magnitude of the blue moon and answers were searched for as to the why and the how.

Further inspiration to the how and why was created by the very exciting visit from Minnie Winnie, the first cloned dog and her owner and author Rebecca Bourne. Whilst the youngest pupils asked superb questions about Minnie's adventures in Rebecca’s books, the Year 2 offered insightful and thoughtful questions about DNA.  In the words of Albert Einstein the Pre Prep have embraced that ‘The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing’. 

Hand in hand with curiosity pupils across the school have been developing their critical thinking skills, from our thinking toolkit. 

Encouraging pupils to look at the world in a playful and curious and creative way

Prep have been creating their own algorithms to map out their journey into space, Year 2 have worked on debugging algorithms for the creation of the perfect alien and in Forest School the pupils used visual algorithms to set trails and used their skills of abstraction to represent the size of other planets in relation to the earth e.g. if earth is 4 nut shells big, mercury will be one - taking away unnecessary information, rounding up exact (and very large) measurements to help us. Year 3 have also been following and writing algorithms. In maths they were number detectives, following clues carefully to find the mystery number. Whilst Year 4 had fun creating algorithms for dance routines at playtime. Year 3 have also been thinking critically about patterns and sequences also helped us with our spellings, and the critical thinking skill of abstraction helped us to precis a longer story and identify the key themes and narrative. Across the school we have been awash with approaching their learning in a critical, creative and curious way. 

Best wishes,

Tracy Handford

Head of Dame Bradbury's

@DameBradburys