Back-to-school wisdom from a principal who never lost touch with her children | HerCanberra

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Back-to-school wisdom from a principal who never lost touch with her children

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With a teaching career spanning more than 40 years including 16 years as the Director of Canberra Grammar’s Northside campus before she retired last year, Jenny Thompson has nurtured thousands of children beginning their journey through the early years of school.

We ask this educational leader to share her wisdom on the joys and challenges of school, how to support little ones in their first crucial years, and mostly, how to get through the next few weeks…

School is about a whole lot more than just becoming literate and numerate, important as these academic skills are. What mind-set should we take into the new academic year, particularly for the kindy kids?

As we begin a new school year, our attention to detail is sharper than ever. It is a great time of the year to get organised and to refine some routines both at school and at home. Just don’t get too caught up in perfection – progress is more important than precision. Stay grounded, focus on the small steps forward rather than over-analysing. Remember, the age of the child. Young children if given the opportunity are inherently confident and capable. They thrive on having agency. This is one of the key features of the Australian Curriculum and other relevant learning frameworks. At the heart of our early learning provision in Canberra, is a commitment by teachers to celebrate children’s voices – their  ideas and their theories.

In the course of my career, I visited the early learning centres and schools of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy. On my first visit to the Scuole Communali Infanzia Anna Frank in 2013, I was intrigued to watch a very small 3-year-old girl work completely on her own, setting up the lunch tables for the children. She pushed in the wooden trolley and very methodically set up two beautiful tables, using real crockery, not plastic. She was so happy that it was her turn to do this and there was so much beginning mathematics  in what she was doing!

Similarly, in an early learning centre in Shanghai, I was intrigued to watch 3 and 4-year-old children eat so competently using small chopsticks. It made me think of the children back in our centres in Canberra where our expectation of fine motor skill development is so very different. I was always grateful that we ate outside as despite our efforts we left so much for the birds!

What are some simple practicals steps for first weeks back?

If you’re a parent, preparing a little one for school in 2025, make sure you talk about being kind to your friends and teachers and show them how to do some packing away and cleaning up. Sometimes, it seems so much easier to just do it yourself when they’ve gone to bed!

The beginning of the school year is also a good time to talk about the importance of a healthy and balanced diet, “everyday and sometimes” foods and to explore the problem of waste with children. When children first get back to school or start school in February they are used to “grazing”. Allow them to make choices and help with packing their own lunch boxes.

How do we nurture reading?

I believe very passionately in the development of the whole child. We do need to put a strong emphasis on children’s academic milestones and quietly (but rigorously) monitor student achievement and attainment. Most reading behaviours can be nurtured with books, be they on an iPad (or other device) or in hard or soft cover.  The important thing is the talk, the joy and the reflection that surrounds the learning to read process.

Setting children up for successful learning takes time and commitment and a genuine partnership between home and school. No matter the age of the student, literacy underpins learning across the curriculum. In recent years,  educators have been debating the correct way to teach reading. In fact, the debate probably goes back about a century! In Canberra schools, as in most schools around the world, there will be a renewed emphasis on explicit decoding (systematic phonics, sometimes called “Science of Reading”) rather than implicit learning through whole-word instruction.

Any tips for dealing with first-week nerves (for both kids and parents!)

The first weeks of the school year can be fraught even when the best of plans have been laid for a wonderful first day or transition to a new school. Even though it’s hard as a parent to keep a cool head, this is when you need to really dig deep.

Is there a story you can tell your child that will bolster them, giving some support and comfort, while playing to your child’s strengths? Using some humour is always a good thing. One first time parent who really impressed me a couple of years ago, told her child that she thought he might be a superhero in disguise! The child went to sleep that night with her rubbing his amazing (and resilient) superhero muscles.

His mother had picked up a happy child from After School Care in the late afternoon but she knew he would be on shaky ground again in the morning when they entered the classroom together. After a few days, the class teacher and I had a chat with the school psychologist who was a brilliant new grad. She explained to us both that sometimes, a child will have an established pattern of separation anxiety. It may have been there some time earlier but then unexpectedly or expectedly it re-emerges when the child is in a new, stressful environment. Sometimes it just reappears unexpectedly in one of the later years of school.

She too applauded the mother’s “superhero in disguise” story and explained that we needed to replace the established behaviour that the child had, with a new start to the day.

We all get it – we all want every child to succeed at school. But more than that we want them to be that whole child, happy and comfortable in themselves.

The most important phrase that all parents and teachers need in their arsenal is that “tomorrow is a new day!”.

What inspired you to become a teacher?

Like most educators, my own schooling had a great impact on my teaching philosophy. Not every experience was positive but as a student of education, I learnt as much from some of the not-so-good experiences as I did from the positive.

I had had wonderful primary experiences in local public schools in NSW and I went to PLC Sydney for my secondary education.

I was initially enrolled in a combined Law Degree but deep down, I knew that I had a vocation for teaching. I worked in a suburban solicitor’s office in the holidays of my first year  at uni and knew that I’d made a terrible mistake.

I’ve always thought that because I had a “tricky transition to university” that it explained why I have always been so happy as a teacher. I graduated from Sydney University in early 1981 with a Bachelor of Education (Honours). My honours work was in Children’s Literature. I studied a post graduate Certificate in Gifted Education by distance through UNSW when my younger child went to school and I had been appointed to work in this area.

At that stage, I had spent seven very fulfilling years working as a coordinator with adults and teenagers who struggled with reading.  I later completed a Graduate Certificate in Education (Early Childhood) and my Masters Degree, both at the University of Canberra. I have worked across systems in government, Catholic Systemic and independent schools.

When you reached a leadership position, how did you stay connected to the kids?

One of the most appealing aspects of the Northside position was that I would be a Teaching Director – two days in the Pre-Kindergarten classroom and three days of administration. I am a very happy classroom teacher. I did not want to be a remote figure but wanted to work alongside the teachers, giving every child the benefit of best practice and individualised opportunities. In a campus of approximately one hundred students this was possible in a way that is not as manageable in larger schools. Because I taught the children as four-year-olds, I was able to track each child from year to year as they made their way through four years of schooling at Northside Early Childhood Campus (Pre-Kindergarten to Year 2).

What if the first week back is hard?

Sometimes there are bumps in the road. Like life itself, the whole experience of school will always be so much more than just the academic. There is a poem, titled ‘All I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten’ by the American author, Robert Fulghum. It was published in the late 80’s and explains how the world would be improved if adults followed the same basic premises children learn in their first year of school- such as being kind to one another, sharing (but not your food, in case your classmate has a nut intolerance!), cleaning up after yourself and living a balanced life of work, play and ongoing or lifelong learning. The phrase, lifelong learning is a key one. It refers to that adaptability that all of us need to have and is a recognisable in all current learning frameworks worldwide.

Do you miss your kids?

My favourite part of the job and the one I missed enormously when I was forced to take six months sick leave (for breast cancer treatment in 2015) were the conversations I had on a daily basis with children. When I got back to school, many of the children (some of them  older students who were past students of Northside) would stop me to give me some words of encouragement.

Although, I was a little bit apprehensive initially, not one child made me uncomfortable. One little one, assured me that a cure was very close and that it probably would be found by one of the kids I had taught! Another child reminded me that we needed to do some research and start with a question. She said to remember that working out the question was really important!

Now that I’m retired, I miss children’s conversation and their innate wisdom so much. One of my colleagues set up a station in the library so that the children could work on some memory cards to be given to me at my retirement dinner. One really made me smile, in fact I’m smiling again as I write this! Only in Year 3, she wrote reminding me to remember, that “I was enough”!

Photography by William Hall.

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