Learning in our School

We want our children to love learning. We teach our children that learning is hard and messy but if we persevere and try we will gradually learn to do something we find hard. We also believe it is important for our staff to be continually learning. As a result we make a range of training available that supports our school improvement e.g. Training on Growth Mindset and Guerilla Learning, Behaviour strategies and becoming an attachment aware school.

We openly talk about “muddles” being good and teachers will model being muddled. When we talk to children about their work we try to unpick their misconceptions and go back and teach the next steps that the child needs to learn to make sure they can address their misunderstanding. We talk about the “magnificent struggle”.

We have 4 learning heroes that we talk about all the time in class. They illustrate in a child-friendly way the key learning behaviour or attitudes we believe our children need to use to be successful in school and in adult life.

Toby Tortoise – he is resilient. He doesn’t give up.

Sally Squirrel – she is resourceful. She applies what she knows to solve a problem.

Emily Elephant – she is reflective. She looks back at her work to mark how she can make it better.

Bert Bee – he works well on his own or in a team. He contributes ideas.

Please click on the link below to find out more about our Learning Heroes in our Building Learning Power parent booklet.

Maths Intervention

We use a variety of strategies to support children that are finding understanding of early number concepts a challenge eg small group support with LSA/teacher as necessary, one to one support or pre learning and “keep up” sessions.

Reading Intervention

At Calmore Infant School, our aim is for every one of our children to become independent, successful and lifelong readers and consequently writers. Above all, we want our children to enjoy reading. The skills for decoding are taught through a progressive phonics scheme from Read Write Inc. As with all learning, some children can find phonics difficult, therefore we provide “reading for meaning” intervention by trained LSA’s using a different reading approach. Any child having this extra daily support will be contacted by our intervention leader and invited into school to find out more.

Please see our separate English Curriculum page for more details about how we teach reading.