Welcome back everyone!

In assembly this morning I introduced the first of our half-termly Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) topics, entitled New Beginnings. We have several new children at school, but even those who’ve been here for a long time have the new experiences of a new classroom, a new teacher, a new seat, a new table partner, new friendships to develop and even new shoes.

To be able to learn well, children need to be happy, confident, understand themselves, understand their feelings and know how to get on with each other and make friends. During the half-term the children will be exploring how to create a learning environment that helps them learn together in a happy, busy and safe way. They will also learn about the feelings they have when they are happy, sad, scared and excited, and how to manage these feelings in the classroom. Our SEAL work is not a new thing at all, we’ve been doing it for years, but hopefully through the blog and our new approach of our Family Groups and possibly even Family SEAL work with you doing something with your children at home too, this will all go to supporting the children further.

I told the children this morning about what I had got up to over the holiday and about one specific moment, this weekend, when Darren, our cook, and I were coasteering around Lee Bay. We were shattered by the time we arrived at Smuggler’s Cove, from Morte Point, and as we emerged from the depths of the seaweed I think we may have frightened two little girls, looking over the rocks at the two oddly-clad things crawling out of the kelp. I asked for some volunteers this morning to draw a creature from the sea and they came up with this…

It was the traditional fold-the-paper-and-don’t-show-the-next-person style of drawing…

  • Daisy Dooley drew the head with three eyes – but if you look closely, they have several eyes within them!
  • Jonah Upward drew scales, a fat belly and eight legs for hitting with, and
  • Gracie Trueman went with jellyfish legs but with only two suckers on each leg.

The children found it fun designing the new creature.

I hope they all find beginning something new equally fun and exciting, even though it may be a little worrying at times… hey, as long as it’s not something like this scary sea creature!