An exciting week at school!

This week, the staff of my school were lucky enough to have two extremely influential sets of visitors come and work with us.

On Wednesday we were joined Miranda McKearney OBE, who created The Reading Agency, and Craig Hill. They are both focusing their energies on a brand new project, Empathy Lab. We're pleased to be one of only 12 schools in the country involved in trialling the project. The focus is on using books and stories to improve children's empathy skills. We talked about a lot of exciting ideas, including creating Empathy Detectives and Book Spotters, as well as using Empathy Mentors The focus will be on the children in Year 5 to start with, but the plan is to spread the initiative across the school. We'll be meeting Miranda and her team again in a couple of months so we can give feedback alongside the other schools involved.

On Friday we were delighted to host a training day delivered by Rob Smith, the genius behind The Literacy Shed website. He spend the whole day sharing inspirational ways to use film and images in the classroom to help improve children's writing. There were about 20 teachers there from about five schools, and it was wonderful to see such a buzz of excitement and enthusiasm in the room. Rob is a really entertaining speaker, with a wealth of knowledge about teaching English, and the general consensus was that it was one of the most useful training sessions in a very long time!