As part of Book Week 2023 (which you can read about here) I set up a parent workshop to promote reading at home. Although a lot of this information is aimed at parents, much of it is useful for us as teachers, or may be information you want to find a way to share with your parents. Remember, pupils spend around 900 hours a year in school around 7800 hours at home – so finding a way to support their learning at home may go a long way to improve their learning within school. As mentioned in my Book Week post, in Malaysia, 95% of adults are literate, which is a big improvement in the last 20 ye ..read more

As part of my remit as Primary English Coordinator it is one of my responsibilities to organise whole school events. This is something new to me this year, but a challenge that I am happy to take on. I have been learning a lot about leadership strategies (and will be writing a blog about this soon) and so tasks like this give me a great opportunity to hone these skills. Book Week in our school falls between the 27th February – 3rd March. This is to ensure it covers World Book Day 2023 on Thursday 2nd March. In Malaysia, although 95% of adults are literate, this simply means they can read and ..read more

It’s been all over the news in the last week that Puffin Books, the editors and publishers of Roald Dahl’s books, had planned to change certain words and passages of the original text due to issues of sensitivity and to ensure the books were up to date with the current cancel culture. In the words of Puffin the changes were planned so that the books ‘can be enjoyed by all children’. In the last 24 hours Puffin have backtracked in light of public outcry and will now continue to publish the original versions. The specifics of the planned changes were in the grander scheme, quite small. Changin ..read more

I’ve read far too many posts recently on social media from new teachers that are struggling with the demands of teaching and wondering if it is the job for them. Perhaps some of the reasons for this can be found in comments from experienced teachers explaining how much more difficult the job is now than in previous decades – ever increasing content in the curriculum, too much paperwork, the technical nature of pedagogy, being up to date with research, more and more instances of challenging behaviour in the class, lack of resources, low pay, the negative impact on mental health – the list of p ..read more

This month I have just started the second installment of the leadership training offered by ISP, the parent company of my school. It’s fantastic to have the opportunity to be supported in my new middle leadership role as I’m starting a whole new learning journey into management. However, this made me realise that I never posted about the first part of the course – so as a way to review what I learned and to share, here goes. In March and April of 2022 I was selected as part of a group of teachers in my school to complete the in house management training courtesy of the parent company of my s ..read more

‘…if a child makes a mistake in Maths never correct them. They are on their own learning journey and will learn the correct way in their own time’ PGDE Course tutor – UK – 2017 This was one of the key takeaways from a workshop during my PGDE year. There were many more like it, and it is exactly as it sounds, the context was simply how to support pupil’s learning in Maths, specifically when using a Venn diagram, and the new teaching cohort, of which I was apart, was learning how to provide effective feedback. Looking back, with more experience and knowledge, the course clearly had its focus on ..read more

This weekend I had the opportunity to attend a regional CPD and networking event courtesy of the parent company of my school, ISP. Around 250 teachers and leaders from 15 schools based in Malaysia gathered together to connect, share and learn together in Kuala Lumpur. This was the first time I’ve attended a mass event like this – and I absolutely loved it! 50 of us nominated ourselves to present at the event over the course of the day – these ‘Speaker Space’ sessions were split up into 5 sessions throughout the day. This worked out brilliantly as at each session there was the choice of aroun ..read more

What is a teaching philosophy? A teaching philosophy statement is; “a systematic and critical rationale that focuses on the important components defining effective teaching and learning in a particular discipline and/or institutional context” (Schonwetter et all, 2002). Essentially, this is the reasons why we do what we do in the classroom. If you are an educator chances are you already have one. You may have one written down and have it clearly articulated, you may just think about it, or you may not even realise you have one and yet use it daily to support your rationale in teaching pedag ..read more

Fx Guru is a free to download app that claims to offer to add ‘the fun and excitement of big budget Hollywood horror, sci-fi, and action move special effects to any video’. Well that’s just too good of an opportunity to turn down, so I’ve been having a play with it. Okay, so you might be saying this is nothing new, FX Guru has been around for nearly a decade. Well that may be true, but I hadn’t heard of it until a few months ago, and neither had my teaching colleagues, so I wanted to quickly share this great app to anyone who hasn’t heard of it or used it before. The app does exactly what it ..read more