Dear Parents,
Watching the cakes, sunflowers, vegetables etc. arrive for the Produce Show this morning was fascinating. Both parents and children were rightfully proud of their efforts. Well done everyone.
There is a tangential link from vegetable growing to my assembly on resilience this week – growing anything through this summer was more of a challenge than usual due to the cooler weather. Our runner beans were very slow to take off! That was resilience in adversity. Creating a vegetable border and planting seeds etc. is creative resilience, it takes time and patience.
The concept of resilience is one that schools have spent a great deal of time over in the last two years but Clare Balding has written a superb book called ‘Fall off, get back on, keep going’ which is directed at prep aged children.
This morning we spent time in assembly looking at some of what she said, listening to Sky Brown (skateboarder) after her big accident in 2020, and hearing about Bethany Taylor (surfer) who won the US national championships having lost her arm to a shark aged 13. That is resilience in adversity.
We also looked at creative resilience and watched this clip from OK Go to show how persistence and teamwork can lead to incredible results. 60 people worked for 6 or so weeks to achieve a 4 minute video shot (including 60 takes).
The autumn term is a long one and requires some resilience, but the challenge I gave them was to consider where they can be resilient in more widely, not just adversity.
Best wishes
Edward Bond
Headmaster