Friday's Reflections

We have now made it to the half way point of this half term. We have done three weeks and we have three weeks to go. January is a hard month to home school in, the weather is cold and wet and the days are very short, the light levels are low and after Christmas we all feel a bit flat. This year, that flatness has been made worse with many families having Covid-19 either for the Christmas period or just after it and the weather being partially poor.

Although many scientists have dismissed the idea of Blue Monday as pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is given to statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with actual the scientific methods. It is often characterised by contradictory and exaggerated or unreliable claims rather than rigorous science investigations.

However, what I can tell you is that we all experienced a real dip in enthusiasm on Tuesday: one day after Blue Monday is meant to happen. Everyone, call after call was feeling flat, disengaged and throughly feed up with everything. Well that was until 3.30pm, when I called one of our little ones in our Reception class. When I was greeted with "Hello Nicola, I can count to 5 all by myself now. Do you want to watch me?" it was like a ray of sunshine bursting through those dark wintery grey clouds. So, I am very grateful! That enthusiasm for cracking counting using the method of counting objects grouped together and knowing that there is 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 objects just by looking - reenergised me and has helped me carry on and get over the line this week.

I am now looking ahead to next week, we have coming up this weekend Compliment Day, our seed swop and the RSPB Big Garden next week end. The cookery club are cooking with blueberries this week. I can't wait to start my day with some blueberry pancakes.

It is time to acknowledge that we have been chipping away at out learning unenthusiastically, we have been working hard in Y8 on prefixes and suffixes, Greek and Latin root words and will be moving on to referencing skills. Y7 have sorted out the prepositions and will be moving on to conjunctions. The Y5 group who are doing a magnificent effort learning their times tables and all about planets. The Y3's have been doing some great writing this week. It may have been some what lack lust this week but we have done it - we have got to the end of our assignments!

Let us count our blessing, enjoy the days that the sun comes out and we have golden light, blue skies and find the joy in the frost patterns and the snow (if you are lucky enough to get some). In my garden, we have the snow drops peaking up, primroses getting ready to show their colour and the seeds (leeks, onions and sweetness) we planted recently have started to germinate.

When things are hard, and they certainly feel very difficult at the moment, the best thing we can do is to just put one foot in front of the other and keep going. We don't have to run, we don't have to skip and just need to keep going.

I am going to borrow a phrase from Captain Tom - "There are better days ahead." We know this because - Spring is on its way. We are only 6 weeks from the official date of spring. The dawn chorus can be heard at 7.00am now and the sun will set around 4.30pm this week and not 4.00pm as it was, at the beginning of term. Let's hold on together and we will soon be able to spend some more time outside with the sun on our faces enjoying those better days. We will get through this and we will be stronger for it.