Let's get organised!

Your school needs you to be organised

Parents already familiar with Harrodian will know how important our faith in the ‘Growth Mindset’ is to the way we set about educating and developing children throughout their school careers. Andy Woodward, Deputy Head of Senior School has summed the Growth Mindset up beautifully in his regular blog on pastoral issues. ‘Anyone, with hard work and good instruction, can improve and develop in any given thing,’ he wrote. ‘We can all get better. We can all progress.’ 

In the Prep School, we aim to lay the foundations for building these constructive thinking and behaviour habits by starting with the basics. We believe that if they want to do their best in class and school our pupils need learn to organise themselves. That’s why this year we’ve chosen Organisation as our first Prep theme of the year.

Our opening Lower Prep assembly in the first week of term set out the simple  message clearly and directly: ‘Your School needs you to be Organised!’  went the opening slogan, while a series of following slides demonstrated what that should mean in practice.

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Thanks to its Lord Kitchener style, the slide may look a bit fierce but our emphasis was on helping children rather than hectoring them. I explained to the children how they can use the checklists in their planners to organise their homework tasks day by day, to ensure they are bringing all the right books and equipment to school on the right day and to find their way around the school site using the maps it contains.  They were reminded of the importance of packing the right items in their name-labelled school and sports bags (above) and pencil cases in good time and zipping them up so that nothing important gets forgotten or lost in transit as pupils travel from home to school and from classroom to classroom.

All of us in the Prep School will be continuing to chant the Organisation mantra throughout the term through our assemblies and in our daily interactions with children. But we recognise that some children will struggle more than others to take it on board quickly. So any extra-curricular help Harrodian parents can offer in encouraging good organisational habits in their children at home is always helpful. In our experience, when children do finally grasp in Benjamin Franklin’s words that, ‘for every minute spent in organising, an hour is earned’, new personal progress and confidence often follow. 
 

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