SPIRIT

Skills

Helping Children to develop:
  • communication, language and listening
  • numerical/mathematical
  • physical, artistic and expressive
  • interpersonal (emotional intelligence)
  • ICT
By offering:
  • a wide range of learning activities and challenges

Personality

Helping children to develop:
  • Individual aptitudes and talents
  • an active citizenship role
  • self-confidence and independence of thought
  • the qualities of the WGS spirit
By creating:
  • the challenge of scholarship
  • opportunities for expressing personality - and for success

Intelligence

Helping children to develop:
  • natural strengths, learning styles and ways of understanding
  • the learning styles that don’t come naturally
Recognising that:
  • everyone has a unique way of thinking about the world
By providing:
  • high expectations and appropriate challenges
  • stimuli and opportunities for curiosity and exploration
  • a variety of approaches to learning

Reflection

Helping children to develop:
  •  themselves and others (ie emotional literacy)
  • an understanding of how they learn best and what motivates them
By encouraging:
  • intellectual rigour
  • self-review and group review of completed tasks
  • circle time activities
  • preparation and organisation

Interest

Helping children to develop:
  • curiosity and inquisitiveness
  • initiative and zest
  • creativity
  • passions and out-of-class activities
By stimulating:
  • an ethos of enquiry and critical thought
  • the spirit of commitment

Tenacity

Helping children to develop:
  • a willingness to stick at things and take risks
  • a willingness to handle and learn from failure
  • a willingness to take the ‘long view’
By:
  • looking for another way round the problem
  • encouraging a ‘can do’ mentality
  • practising democratic skills of argument, negotiation and compromise