In the month of May, people all around the world celebrate May the 4th - Star Wars Day! 'May the 4th be with you' (or should I say, 'May the force be with you') is heavily referred to as Growth Mindset. 

​If you Google mindset and Star Wars, reams and reams of pages, websites, posters, blogs, worksheets and videos pop up to explain the link. Yoda has a Growth Mindset and Darth Vadar has a Fixed Mindset. However, there is a huge problem comparing mindset with Star Wars. Mindset is not as simple as this. It is important that teachers and our children get to grips with the dark side of the force.

Young children are not going to sit and listen to 30 minute teacher videos. Keep teacher input as concise and as short as possible. Plan lessons with lots of activities for children to complete. This will reduce screen time and keep children engaged for longer.

'Turning teachers into teams' is the slogan that pops up on Teacherly's homepage. I always get excited at the prospect of allowing teachers to collaborate more and work more effectively. When teachers work together and share ideas - great things happen! Teacherly aims to do this by providing an online platform where resources, planning and ideas are shared easily whilst linking teachers together through collaborative discussion.

Incase you missed it, we shared 25 top teaching tips for advent via our Social Media accounts. For your ease we have listed all of them below in one festive blog for you to refer back to any time you like. You are more than welcome! As always, please do get in touch with any pictures, videos or comments on how you used these tips in your classroom. We love hearing from you! We hope you had a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Both in the UK and across the globe, schools had adopted the CAT4 test which measures student's four main types of ability known to make a difference to learning and achievement. CAT4 provides an independent perspective on potential pupil achievement that can be used to identify and reveal a child's true hidden potential. But once you have done the assessment what do you do next? What do all the numbers mean and how can we analyse them at a deeper level to really gain a better understanding of our children? Moreover, how do we know if we need to do things differently in the classroom?

​​Keeping children's attention can be very challenging in a classroom environment. Not all children are wired the same and not all our curriculum objectives are very engaging. 90% of the information available to us was created in the past 2 years which is a mind-blowing fact! As Ben Parr states, the modern world is full of information and so for us teachers, our challenge is to make our information and learning, that we are presenting to our students, more important and more engaging than anything else. An impossible task you may think. 

Ben states that in order to gain attention, there are 3 stages: Immediate, short and long. this links to our classroom environment and is fairly straight forward. Immediate attention refers to small individual tasks that may be set within one lesson. Short term attention refers to children being engaged within a single lesson and long term links to a child being engaged across an entire unit of learning.

​In the classroom, we can use these as a focus and ambition for our own lessons. We can use these stages to grab children's attention and foster a love of learning which will engage them not only in the short term but for life.