An exciting week!

This week we were lucky enough to have two extremely influential sets of visitors come and work with us at Moorlands.

On Wednesday we were joined Miranda McKearney OBE, who created The Reading Agency, and Craig Hill. They are both focusing their energies on a new project, Empathy Lab. We are pleased to be one of only 12 schools in the country trialling this 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 around the school. We're now going to create an action plan to ensure that it all gets done! We'll be meeting with Miranda and her team again in a few months to share our progress alongside the other 11 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!