Greasley Beauvale Primary School is working with ‘Thinking Matters’ to become a Thinking School.

Thinking Schools focus on explicit teaching of fundamental cognitive processes and uses a common language of thinking, which leads to a better understanding and effective construction of knowledge for our pupils.

Becoming a Thinking School means that we will enable all our children to become reflective thinkers, self-motivated and self-regulated. The children will be taught a range of strategies to use not only in the classroom but also throughout the whole of the school day. These skills and strategies will underpin all aspects of our curriculum, align with our Rainbow values and ethos.

To become a Thinking School and achieve our goals, a whole school approach will be necessary whereby all stakeholders, including our parents and our school governors will need to be involved and committed to our school aims so that our children can achieve the best.

We are beginning to use and implement 'Thinking Routines,' within our curriculum. These thinking routines allow the children to make connections, ask questions and think about their thinking using a clear strategy. To find out which routines we are currently using, please have a look at the PowerPoint below. 

We recently had our first full staff CPD day with our Thinking Matters consultant, Gemma. Throughout the day we learnt how the brain works, commits learning to the long term memory and how to retrieve this information to make connections to new learning.

To find out more about the brain and the science behind how we learn, please take a look at the PowerPoint below.

What is a Thinking Move?

We have introduced our children to the Thinking Moves A - Z, a scheme which was designed by Roger Sutcliffe in 2019. It is a metacognitive strategy which supports the way in which our children approach their learning. Instead of simply asking our children to 'think' about a problem, we use the Thinking Moves to explain clearly what type of thinking skill they need to use in order to solve a problem or complete their learning.