St Christopher’s School Trust (Epsom)
ANNIE THACKRAY
Blending Challenge and Enjoyment During a recent conversation with a group of friends about degree choices and career dreams, one member of the group gave a throw away comment that has stuck in my mind ever since. He said, “I love learning about the past and would have loved to study history but I hated history lessons at school”. This concept should surely be an oxymoron: to love learning about the past but not to have been engaged with the very subject dedicated to teaching it? My reply was immediate and consisted of absolute faith that the next generation will not see history lessons like that. Talking from my experience as Head of a small Pre-Prep, I then began to discuss how history is currently taught with a delicious emphasis on the practical wherever possible and a very early introduction to an awareness of bias by historians with even young children asked to consider the primary source of their factual evidence taken from books or the internet. The job of any teacher is to inspire and motivate. In my opinion the independent sector lead the way with the confidence that ‘enjoyment’ is a pre-requisite to successful learning and certainly here at St Christopher’s our stated objective is to provide ‘irresistible’ learning activities in a stimulating environment that cannot fail to engage even the most potentially reluctant child. In order to prepare our young children to succeed in subjects such as the humanities, we need our children to enjoy and feel confident about writing, but above all to believe in themselves as independent writers. We are famous for our writing, as our Reception classrooms will demonstrate. There are many daily reasons to write independently, allowing the children to use early phonics skills with confidence. Using fiction is a perfect initial stimulus. Under the umbrella topic of ‘Superheroes’ Julia Donaldson’s ‘Superworm’ inspired the Reception teachers to fill the classroom with worms! Children patiently layered the worm tank with compost and newspaper strips before putting the real worms in to it, having handled, measured and studied them with joy! Very lifelike jelly worms were placed on every table encouraging maths for the part-part-whole method of
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investigating numbers, and the children cut out different lengths of worm before laying them out across the classroom to order them according to size. The following week Sue Hendra and Paul Linnett’s delightful book ‘Supertato’ launched a room full of industry. By creating a crime scene overnight with vegetables left taped around the classroom in perilous places, and signs of Evil Pea at work, children were delighted to witness the chaos and inspired to seize sheets of paper to write to Supertato asking for his help as illustrated by 4 year old Maryam’s contribution complete with full stop: “help me sooputayow plis.” The success of diverse learning opportunities comes with strategic planning. The cooks were asked to arrive in pretend shock describing how there had been a break in at the school kitchens with the freezer door mysteriously left open. Cue a discussion about frozen food, why it exists and what happens to it when subject to heat. The children were beyond excited (possibly at the thought of no more peas!) as they sought paper once again to write down their findings and plan a strategy. The ‘Making Area’ was packed with children trying to make an Evil Pea ‘catching machine’ ranging from helicopters with cages to long mouse trap configurations, the constructions kept coming with children deliberating on their choice of machine, diligently perfecting
“We need our children to enjoy and feel confident about writing, but above all to believe in themselves as independent writers”.
