Catton Grove School incorporates eleven “core values” into its curriculum with the intention of strengthening the culture and building a school ethosl, a set of beliefs, ideas and common values ​​that will be learned through “courageous actions” creating social behavior at school and helping to create a strong community identity.

The School Assembly is one of the organs of organization and celebration to achieve a united, cohesive and strong educational community. The assembly celebrates everything that happens in the school, involving all of the improvements in the quality of learning and rewarding the good attitude of the students. Once a month all the students of the center and their teaching staff and assistant staff meet and a member of the management team introduces one of the fundamental values ​​that will be worked on transversally throughout the month. All students will be aware and understand why this value has been chosen and why it is important for our growth. Over the next month, at the class level, students will apply their understanding and work on different ways that this value can be “put into action.” Students who strive to work on this value and are able to demonstrate it throughout the month receive a class reward for your efforts. And each week, individually some, who have made a significant effort linked to that monthly "value" worked, are chosen to be the "Star of the Week".

In the School Assembly, personal and class achievements are celebrated, certificates and diplomas are awarded and, in short, all achievements are celebrated and linked by relating the value worked with the learning and improvements acquired during the month. It is a highly anticipated moment and it is highly valued to be awarded. Visually there are stars, awards, comments on why they have been given, improvement…

There are eleven core values ​​at Catton Grove

• (Pride) Pride: feeling truly satisfied when we have done our best on something or worked with others to make a difference.

• (Respect for ourselves and for others) Respect for ourselves and for others: to develop self-respect by understanding that we are all unique and to actively take care of ourselves by keeping our minds and bodies healthy.

• (Resilience) Resilience: to understand that we will all face challenges in our lives and the importance of having the mindset and doing the right actions to reach them and "recover" again when things get tough.

• (Creativity) Creativity: to use our imaginations to express ourselves in different ways, to explore ideas, solve problems, and think outside the box.

• (Gratitude) Gratitude: focus on what is good in our lives and be grateful for the things we have.

• (Change) Change: To understand the power of change and when used positively, it can make us a better person and improve the lives of others.

• (Independence) Independence: to develop our independence by having more confidence in our skills, our choices and decisions, and how we can take more responsibility, with a positive mindset.

• (Ambition) Ambition: setting challenging goals and knowing that if we work hard and be resilient, then our dreams could come true!

• (Adventure) Adventure: to deliberately try new challenges and experiences that extend ourselves and show us what we never knew we were capable of!

• (Unity) Unity: to enjoy cooperating with others so that we can share ideas and opinions to improve the world we live in and celebrate what we collectively achieve within our "school family".

• (Wisdom) Wisdom: taking everything we learn and experiences we have and thinking deeply about them so that we use this new learning to make good decisions and be even better in the future.

• Caring about other people's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs and acting in ways that celebrate what is similar and different between people.

Celebrate everything, any small progress, giving relevance to the growth mindset, a positive attitude towards the learning process and its understanding together with the strategy of giving an institutional, academic and affective value to its achievements, which brings great personal satisfaction, We believe that it is one of the keys to achieving such a responsible and good attitude towards the effort and the better learning that we observe in the students.

Talk for Writing

"Talk for writing" is a program, which was developed by Pie Corbett and Julia Strong, based on the fundamental principles of how children learn to explore the creative processes involved in "being a writer". Above all it aims to achieve throughout all primary education a student body very competent in reading, text comprehension and writing and at the same time who “loves” and enjoys the process of reading and writing.

At Catton Grove, like many other schools in the UK, they work the English language from this global core approach. They explain us in the school that, in order to carry out the program in a transversal way, all the staff have attended specific training.

We have been able to freely enter the classrooms and observe all the groups, which in Catton Grove range from two years to eleven years, the age at which they finish primary education in the United Kingdom. Despite not having been able to see all the phases of the process, since we were only there for a week, we could see all the work done in previous sessions. the final results, in large papers of joint creations hanging in the class and in the student's notebooks (which systematically record all the steps of the creative process).

The same students explain in their own words why drawings and actions help to remember and “Build Memory” and have fun because what they want is to learn to write a good text.

“Story map”, a visual aid to memory, created jointly, which allows you to “re-read” the story

At the end of the week, adding previous and new knowledge ,thanks teachers and assistants conversations and the job shadowing of sessions and strategies of different ages and stages of the program, we gained a global idea.

We think one of their key success is the figure of the "teacher assistant". They are people hired by the school to work under the supervision of the teacher, to help in the teaching processes and give additional attention to the students. Another factor of success is the role of the school headmaster. He has strong leadership and the responsibility of managing the center. He decides how to use the budget assigned to his school, therefore he has autonomy in the choice of teachers and assistants, deciding how many staff to hire and the resources he prioritizes for bring your center vision to fruition. The role of the teachers is also very important, as they prepare the lesson plans, document and evaluate their students progress and they are responsible to create a positive learning environment and plan and organise an effective assistant work.

As its name suggests, the “Talk 4 Writing” methodology begins by “TALKING” . We could to observe how students imitate oral language, then read and analyze it and finally learn to write their own version of the story. In the process they imitate using gestures and the whole body, they work on memory, expand their vocabulary and knowledge of different types of texts and structures, and finally end up writing their own stories.

There are many strategies they use in the process, one of them is “boxing up”, a strategy to help understand and internalize how the text worked is structured, using an outline to complete more visually.

Depending on the age, different types of text are worked, we saw children's stories for the youngest and newspaper articles and “police” riddles for the oldest. We soon realized all the school follows the same"work- line"that can be observed in all the sessions. We attended a class where we observed the “boxing up” strategy, a strategy to help students internalize a sense of organization and text structure using a scheme with squares . Inside these squares they should analyze and be able to encapsulate key words or answers to key moments in the text. This reference will help later to understand and better support a new writing. The strategy itself was not a novelty for us, but it was interesting the way to approach the whole session, an action-line that observed in all classes regardless of the subject. On this occasion the teacher worked on a model with the whole class, and we could see the first step: to make the students aware of what is expected of them at the end of the session.

They began every class presenting on the digital board the “LT” (“Learning target”) of the session, divided into three levels of acquisition. We were struck by the fact that the students were fully aware of why they learn and what they learn for.

We also observed this in their notebooks, which begin with what they are expected to learn in the term (it may be different for each student based on their initial evaluation) and show their achievement at the end of the activities. We see how they start the process with what they call “Cold Task”, (write before receiving prior training) and how they end up with a new writing composition “Hot Task” (write at the end of the process the new text with all the ingredients of what have learned).

In the sessions we observed how the teacher did not explain, but rather presented challenges or activities and guided the 10-11 year old students with their questions, to draw their conclusions. Very far from the master class to which we are more accustomed: "Let's look at the first paragraph ..." "What is the key information?" "What is the basic structure of a newspaper article?" They reflect all the time on what they have learned and ask them encouraging them to answer: 5 W's: WHO WHAT WHERE WHEN WHY, to then be able to write in pairs and individually, analyzing the model text and encapsulating the answers in a written record. With these data they will be able to rewrite the story or change some parameter to write a similar story, adapting the text to the new changes and introducing the elements that are interesting to reinforce at that time: in this case they were asked to use “Relative clauses” (which).

Different models were presented with exercises for group-class "Spot the difference", correct error ... ". All activities designed so that they acquire the objective by themselves, through observation and participation.

As a reflection on the “boxing up” strategy, we found it very interesting since it allows us to introduce other subjects. For example, if the action happens in a desert and we change the setting to the jungle, the students must change the characters that participate to jungle animals and adapt the action that happens to the new situation and habitat. This allows to expand vocabulary, interrelate knowledge of other disciplines, etc. At a young age, students use the dictionary competently, accustomed to looking for synonyms or words to add to semantic fields that help to build new stories.

In general, we observed a lot of interaction aimed at seeking motivation and arousing the interest of the students, “Teacher versus class”, the teacher mimicked the encoded text and then the class would mimic it, and we as outside observers voted who the winner was.

We wrote down ideas and data in the job shadowing monitoring guides, but they were not enough. In a 45' session they have posed challenges on the digital whiteboard, with a digital stopwatch to monitor working time. The assistants, in some cases two per class, helped students with difficulties or who required it at specific times. The whole group read the symbols of the story (a story coded in drawings), they read it involving the body with actions, they memorized and reproduced it in pairs, they recited… with a musical instrument (in each class a different one) a soft sound indicated that it is necessary to return to the calm, and miraculously it was obtained. And then the prizes came: two crowns for those who had worked some aspect of the activity best for the youngest, “Class dojo” in other groups. Rewards and positive reinforcement are widely used in class. Then they explained other strategies such as the "5 to 1" to reinforce positive behaviors, follow rules, participation or learning achieved, highlight five positive things for each criticism or aspect to improve.

Sometimes, the teacher asks with “thumb up” techniques if they have understood something and those who cannot get out of the carpet and go to the assistant to work on reinforcing the subject in a manipulative way. They have a lot of manipulative material created by attendees.

We are amazed at how the teachers dedicate themselves to their role of planning, teaching and leading the class efficiently and the assistants follow their instructions, ensuring that they create material, photocopies, stickers, manage specific behavioral, health, emotional and reinforcement problems ...

Little by little we understand the "Talk for writing" process.

Stages of "Talk for Writing"

IMITATION: First you have to "internalize" the text, to do so, create "story maps" or "text maps" ("story map or text" (story map) and invent actions for part of the text. This allows to imitate and "reread" drawings. Students learn by heart a history through actions with the support of a" storymap "that the assistant draws on large pieces of paper, identifying the fundamental characteristics of the type of text and doing group activities, in pairs and individually.

In this phase we observed that two people are rewarded daily, giving great importance to the objectives achieved Not only physically (crown) but highlighting the achievements in diplomas obtained in the joint Assembly .

INNOVATION: To create your own version following the structure of the learned text, students make simple changes to the original text, which alters it minimally. This small change means that they must re-internalize the new text, rework it to add the changes that the transformation we have made will mean. For this, strategies such as “boxing up” are used to organize ideas and actions (encapsulated in different tables and grills) to plan and thus be able to write their own version at the end of the week. During the weeks that the process lasted, the original text has been modeled, changes have been made jointly and seen how to “redo” the text and students have been equipped with the necessary skills to be able to invent their own text from beginning to end . At this stage the students will write their own ideas to “innovate” the model text by doing their own “boxing up” (plan the ideas and actions that will happen in sections).

INDEPENDENT INVENTION / APPLICATION: Invent by themselves to create an independent writing, their own story or tale using the structure learned through imitation and innovation. Thanks to the previous planning they will be able to create a new and creative text independently. As they grow, they add characteristics that they must use in their productions to improve their writing. They write on sheets that are glued to the notebooks and independently they redo their drafts incorporating the teacher's modifications (marked with colors or comments) and redoing the texts. Sharing and comparing their ideas and working from them allows the students to use another “magpie” strategy, which means that they can use their colleagues' good ideas in their own writing.

As a result of all these strategies together, students must be able to feel comfortable and able to create their own writing. They also identify and reflect on what are the “key ingredients” they need to be able to include them in their work and obtain a quality result.

What we have observed, the result of excellent planning and the sum of a cumulative line of work, achieves a result that, of course, has impacted us and makes us reflect on how we could adapt this model in our school, using it to learn a third language, English.

Music at Catton Grove

No doubt one of the inclusive activities that sets Catton Grove apart from other schools is its innovative music program. They have recently been awarded the 2019 Best Music Department Award (“Norfolk Primary School Music Award”), chosen for their “inspiring and innovative approach to teaching music.

We observe 45 'classes in which they carry out activities aimed at the whole class and also in pairs, in other sessions activities are carried out only with small groups. The classroom is spacious and very well equipped. It has ipads, headphones, special supports created to facilitate collaborative work, real instruments, a digital whiteboard…

We take note of some of the “apps” that they use and we realize that all the students are capable of creating music by themselves…

In the session the students sing, listen to record their productions, play instruments, make the sound arrangements, sometimes they go to another room to finish a final production… we can connect and listen to what they are doing. They work helping each other to improve the final production. The result is shocking.

They explain to us that students have the opportunity to attend extracurricular classes in what they call "clubs" to learn to play a real instrument; usually piano or guitar. Students can join the school choir and the percussion orchestra and also, from the KS2 level (equivalent 9-10 years (3rd grade), they can already participate in the orchestra. The results are given visibility and importance from the school , since it organizes and participates in school events where they sing and do performances

The international classroom

In the international classroom, an emotional and more individualized response is given to students who have just arrived or who have difficulties in acquiring the English language. to our “reception classroom.”

They explain to us how the first moment is “survival English.” Acquire quickly and effectively the English necessary to be able to function socially in school and in their classes and their day-to-day school life. The students, in their individualized plan, leave their classroom to the international classroom until they acquire this minimum level, they continue to have extra support when they need it within the classroom especially Thank you to the attendees and continue to attend the international classroom to work on other linguistic aspects. We accompany them in one of these sessions in which two seniors are helped to be more prepared to pass the SAT tests. These are external assessment tests that are passed in the UK in year 2 and year 6 (equivalent to our first and fifth years) to see their educational progress. In year 2 it would be about reading and math and in year 6 reading in math and language: English, grammar, punctuation and spelling (spelling / spelling that connects pronunciation and spelling). Keep in mind that English has many homophonic words (which sound the same or similar but are spelled differently and their meaning is different).

We also observe other strategies and dynamics to learn vocabulary and communicate. In the international classroom there is a welcoming atmosphere, integrating many elements that are familiar to you and value your native cultures. One of the assistants energize the classroom is of Russian origin, which makes communication much easier since it is one of the most important immigration points of origin in Catton Grove. Looking around us we can see on the walls and materials all the work that is done to understand cultural aspects of the United Kingdom, its countries of origin, how they create "learning environments" and recreate situations of daily life that allow working through of centers of interest.

Every month “The language of the month” is worked and activities are carried out around that language and its culture. This is how breakfasts are planned with families, where they are invited to participate and We have the opportunity to attend a lunch with parents at “Foundation Stage” (which would be equivalent to p4 in early childhood education). We attended first thing, on Tuesday, January 28, the course tutors, assistants, parents and students (and us). This joint activity consisted of a lunch, a story read by parents and joint activities.

In the international classroom we were able to immerse ourselves in a space with a lot of material organized by themes, which allowed us to recreate real situations that connected the newly arrived students with the language.

We were able to reflect on the great support offered by the communicative approach, this method of teaching a language based on the functions of the language in real life, helped by a wide variety of manipulative material, part of it purchased but also created by the students. and mostly by the assistants.

Our special education teacher, looked for many moments to observe this classroom and her work creating a bond and establishing the bases for a collaboration in eTwinning between centers.

The library is a special, cozy space with a central rug, reading cushions on the floor, a huge touch table, and easily accessible bookshelves for children. There is a figure who is in charge of making everything work well, the librarian, a woman who, although she is not a teacher, for years she has organized, proposed ideas and is in charge of monitoring activities. We think she is the soul of the library.

We enter the library at different times, when the children are inside (entire classes have their reading time programmed in the library) . We see how the students individually read the chosen book, suitable for their age. Students choose a book appropriate to their reading characteristics, aided by a color code:

Accelerated Reader Star Assessment

A pupil reads a book, takes an online quiz, and gets immediate feedback. Children respond to regular feedback and are motivated to make progress with their reading skills.

We observed the students sitting down on the carpet in the library reading quietly. Some assistants were calling the children individually to read a little with their supervision and they were monitoring their progress, writing down the indicators in a notebook. We realized that significant improvements were visually valued, with these percentages of “star-shaped” reading improvements that could be seen on each class' mural.

Each student also had a personal reader registration book. There were several types of notebook depending on the course. The course we were job shadowing was using a "reading registration book" for readers who are already getting an independent reading. In the book it was indicated the name of the chosen book, the level, which page of the book was going, comments and new or difficult words that they had found, finally they scored from 1-10 how much they liked reading the book.

The QR code to scan is on the librarian's table

On the other hand, we observe that each student, when they finish their book, goes to the librarian's table, where they take a tablet and scan a QR code. She asks them some questions about reading and with the tablet they go to another corner to answer reading comprehension questions about the book in question. All this they do quietly and very autonomously.

At another time the librarian reads a story aloud, in this case it is "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (the Wizard of Oz) by Lyman Frank Baum, illustrated by WW Denslow. He is reading and showing the illustrations.

Reading at Catton Grove, like everything else, is also highly valued and supported in a "very visual" way.

In assemblies, in classes and in the hallways, improvements in reading speed, in comprehension, in the number of books read are recognized ... everywhere!

Notebooks: evidence of the educational reflection process

Observing the classes we saw that there were no textbooks, practically everything was organized from the digital whiteboard, orally, solving cards and writing the result on individual whiteboards (which were proudly raised by pupils showing their content when they were done). That system allowed them to erase and modify , add other mates' ideas, correct…

In the class there are a lot of manipulative and support material (such as dictionaries, tablets) and student notebooks for “English”, “Maths”, “Topic” and “Handwriting” (calligraphy).

An English notebook (Talk for writing) at the end of the course will look like this:

Throughout the week we do not see the pupils writing in any notebook, but they show us their interior, where visually the entire learning process is structured: They begin with the objectives that they are expected to learn during the term. All the students are aware of where he is and what is expected of him at the end of every lesson plan.

The exercises are added, glued or put together in notebooks. For example, in "Talk for writing" they showed us how they start with an initial free writing "cold task" before knowing anything about the subject, then samples of different activities are being added to the notebook and finally a final writing "hot task" applying everything they have learned, using the diagrams, resources, etc. All the activities are corrected following a color correction code, and there is an opportunity to redo and improve taking into account the observations received.

Every topic/lesson plan is finnished with a reflection of what they have learned to do, adding in a rubric the items that they have incorporated / learned, the objectives that have been met.

The notebook also allows to have a follow-up and control of the activities carried out, it combines the exercises carried out in class with their reflections, corrections, new activities and finally the teacher's feedback, sometimes orally or in writing, in which it is compared what the student believes to have achieved with the teacher's evaluation and his reward for those objectives achieved. All these activities that we see in the notebook have been previously done on class cards, and they are glued on the notebooks, so that the student writes the date, the statement and then pastes the created result. The notebook becomes a very visual tool that allows the student to be aware of their evolutionary process and quality improvement.

In the following photographs you can see different pages of notebooks of various students.

We want to highlight the sheets that mark the expected objectives and those of reflection on these objectives, which include concrete and individualized objectives (handwritten), the objectives that are proposed, a specific objective for that student who writes the teacher by hand and how indicates that they will obtain a star or they will be able to choose a prize every time they manage to reach one of their “learning target” specified at the beginning of the topic.

Objectives, reflection and awards: Using the notebook each student knows that the achievement of the agreed objectives will be awarded with a star and they try to apply all the achievements to the tasks and the last writing production. After the final reflection, they think about what they have learned, contrast it with the teacher's opinion and obtain a prize.

Here you can see some photographs illustratating different creative processes that are pasted to the notebook: sheets, objectives, reflections and the teacher's feedback and corrections, often visual (color underlining the wrong piece, notes, stamps ...).

A window to school: Yoga in Spanish

When we learned that the school had introduced Spanish classes on their curriculum, we did not hesitate to offer our help in the Spanish classes we attended. But our most significant contribution was the class of our yoga and music specialist that he taught in group 5 of the oldest: A yoga class in Spanish.

The yoga session was carried out with three different parts.

The first part of the session explained the history of yoga that begins on the banks of the Ganges river where every morning a group of yogis meets to do yoga.

The first thing the students did is connect to each other through the vowels: a, e, i, o, u, which are found in different parts of our body. This singing allows us to connect with each other and also focus with the breath. It is important to learn to breathe correctly and deeply through abdominal breathing, that is, with the nose and belly. This technique improves the functioning of the respiratory system and calms the mind, because the calmer and more regular the breath, the more the thoughts are calmed.

Then the students woke up different parts of their body, explaining the names of these parts in Spanish: feet, legs, hands, fingers ...

In the main part of the session, different yoga poses, asanas, inspired by nature animals, with their name in Spanish, were presented with a card game. The students identified which animal it was, repeated the name of the pose in Spanish and then they performed the pose. Once all the poses were presented in Spanish, music was played so that they could move freely around the room, thus working on body expression, and when the music stopped, a student remembered one of the poses, he performed it and the rest imitated him. This exercise allowed them to finish internalizing the name of the posture in Spanish and the asana.

They then carried out a concentration exercise. Three different sounds were presented: frog, whistle, and bell. Each time one of these sounds was played, the students made a different movement. With their eyes closed they should listen to the sound with concentration and remember what movement they should make with that sound.

In the last part we took the students to relax with a "Pizza massage".

The massage consisted of “making a pizza on the back of a partner” with the ingredients of the pizza in Spanish language.

Practicing yoga has many positive benefits for our students and that is why we wanted to share a yoga session in Spanish in Norwich. In the sessions different aspects such as coordination, sense of balance and flexibility are worked on. We also work with attention span, group cohesion as well as connecting with your feelings and emotions, sharing them and above all enjoying the experience.