News Blog

On Tuesday 8th October, we were very pleased to welcome Shelley Birkett-Eyles, the director and creator of Hemispheres Think Write, a structured Handwriting Programme, to speak to our parents and staff in F1 through to Year 2. This is an excellent programme for developing cursive handwriting, structured around the development of an internal cognitive framework, a ‘hook’, to make the learning of handwriting easier. Shelley is an occupational therapist who has worked in Psychiatry, Neurology and Neurosurgery before expanding her experience to Paediatrics and working closely with schools. We were pleased to see so many families attending the workshop.

Listening to Shelley is absolutely fascinating and her explanation of how children’s brains develop from a young age helped us to understand why this approach to handwriting is so effective. She also had a great number of fun activities that can be used with the youngest children, at home and at School, to help develop their gross and fine motor skills, preparing them for learning.

This half term, the children have thoroughly enjoyed meeting the characters Harriet the Cow, Rupert the Sheep and Georgia the Pig, and are getting to grips with pre-writing skills in Nursery up to consolidating letter shapes and size, height and strokes in Year 2.