Rydal Penrhos Daily Notes – June 9

Day 55 from Rydal Penrhos school’s keyworker childcare provision – 24 pupils, 8 staff

Today was World Oceans’ Day and the Prep School classes were kept busy with an array of different themed activities.

Whether at home or here in school I was lucky enough to see many pupils engaged with their learning tasks. Writing fervent letters to politicians to help clean up our oceans, or encouraging other pupils to save plastic waste and recycle it (have you been saving your plastic lids for our penguin?), or painting pictures of our beautiful sea creatures, it was a hive of activity in and out of school today.

It continues to amaze me how well our pupils across the school are interacting and learning from home. This is an all-round effort from teachers, parents and pupils and I am in a privileged position to be able to drop into any of the virtual lessons that are happening across the day.

I’m not sure if you can picture how this works…all members of a Teams class can see a list of all participants, even though only nine are showing as videos online at any one time (the latest speakers are on the screen along with the teacher at all times).

No-one knows when I will be popping in to say hello and watch what’s going on and it usually takes a few seconds for some bright spark to check the list of participants and note that I have entered the lesson.

With younger children someone usually shouts out, “Mrs Davies is here!” and the lesson descends into chaos as everyone tries to say hello at once, the images flicker about from one child to another on-screen and the teacher wrestles to get everyone’s attention back to adding fractions or looking at the latest phoneme (sorry teachers).

With older pupils, it is often the opposite as pupils start to whisper to each other “Mrs Davies is here” as though I am an inspector coming to check up on them!

It’s almost as though I can see them all and they immediately sit up taller and pay attention with great diligence to the screen!

The teacher has been too busy to notice that my name has popped up on the list of participants but they do notice the change in mood; this usually results in a pause in their sentence, presumably a glance at the participant list and then, “Good morning Mrs Davies”.

I always say hello and try to minimise interruptions but it’s very hard not to join in with the lessons (sorry teachers)!

Our world’s oceans are a little bit safer after today and our pupils a little bit wiser, hopefully, we’ll be able to enjoy them a little bit more soon!

Mrs Lucy Davies

Head of Rydal Penrhos Prep School