Does the weather affect the children? I think the majority of people who work in schools would say yes.If it is windy the children are always hyped up, rain leads to wet play which makes for a difficult lesson after break, if it’s too hot they can’t concentrate, snow – you haven’t a chance….
We live in a country where weather is unpredictable and varied, there is a theory that has winter as cold, March as windy, April as wet, summer as hot, November as grey but those are generalisations and we’ve all seen it hot in March, very wet in July and windy almost any day of the year. We need to be able to overcome this – or is it that we just need to stop making excuses?
Is this what we are doing? Making excuses or is it a valid explanation? We certainly can’t claim “snow” as a special circumstance during exam time, however unusual snow in June is – even for England! Is there a way to get the children to ignore the weather, after all there is always weather of some sort or another.
People with more time and money than me have done some research, for example http://bit.ly/1bPC44O showed that temperature did make a difference in concentration in some tests that were carried out. I can see that snow in some countries may not have the novelty value that it does here but is embracing the novelty a better way forward occasionally? Or do we, as apparently happened recently (http://bit.ly/16JHHGD) try and get children to ignore the weather?
I was led to wonder about this as I’ve just been into town to see chairs from outside a local coffee shop blowing about the roads and diversion signs being lifted into the air; it distracted me!
Hopefully tomorrow the weather will be warmish, dryish, greyish with a light breeze, perhaps these are the optimum learning conditions? If not I guess we’ll just have to get on with it!
