In January 2010 Year 1 wrote to Mr Wallace about the website...

Dear Year 1,

Thank you so much for all of your letters. Miss Symonds has scanned them all in and emailed them to me. I was very impressed that you are all able to use the Internet so well and I was also pleased to find out that you like looking around the school website.

You are very clever! When I was in Year 1 we did not have the Internet. In fact when I was in Year 11 we did not have the Internet. You might not believe it, but when I first started teaching in 1992 we still did not have the Internet.

You certainly will not believe this.

When I started teaching at Woodberry Down in January 2000 I was the Deputy Head of the Junior School – there were two separate schools then – the Infants and the Juniors. When I started teaching at the school I had a Year 5 class.

There was no Internet, no computer room… although I did have a very old computer in my classroom. My class was Cedar Class, but in those days Cedar Class was taught in the room where Palm Class are taught now.

When I was the Deputy Head I was also in charge of literacy teaching and ICT teaching. It was so hard to teach ICT because there were hardly any computers, no ICT rooms and no projectors.

Guess what we did? Tony (our IT technician) and myself worked every weekend for weeks and weeks to change an old classroom into what is now called ICT 1. We took down all the old wallpaper that was in that classroom, we threw out lots and lots of junk and then we painted it. After that Tony put all the electrical things in and then we put up all the tables. Finally all the computers came and the room was ready.

That was our first ICT room. It was first used in the summer of the year 2000.
The Year 1 children in 2000 would not have known how to use it at all.

I am so glad that you all seem to be computer experts. I’m not surprised though. Woodberry Down now has three computer rooms. Not many primary schools do.
So you are very lucky!

Please do lots and lots of really good work. Your teachers can then choose some of your work to go onto this website. Maybe you could make a film to go on here? You seem to be a really clever group of children.

Yours sincerely,

Mr Wallace