Blog

Blog week ending 13th January

Posted on: 13/01/2023

Welcome to a new term and a new year! As you can see from this blog we have started as we mean to go on, with a busy schedule of enriching trips, and exciting ‘hands-on’ learning experiences.

Introducing Head of Mathematics, Mrs Ogunlana who joined us last term. Mrs Ogunlana brings a wealth of experience and dynamism to our Maths Department and has a particular passion for demystifying mathematical concepts. Mrs Ogunlana added “making the curriculum relatable to everyday life and seeing the practical application in the workplace and daily life helps students understand concepts and make connections with other subjects and the relevance of topics to potential career pathways”

In this lesson Year 9 students are currently factoring quadratics. Solving quadratic equations are used to calculate speed, area or even determining business profit. This topic is widely used across business sectors, particularly in engineering and mechanics.

Introducing Mr Barron, Teacher of History who joined us last term from Townley Grammar School where he completed his training. “I am delighted to be working with the students at Stone Lodge School who have already demonstrated a real talent for History.” “In History classes at Stone Lodge we don’t only explore historic events and people, but crucially, encourage students to make connections between the past and explore how it impacts the ‘now’”. Mr Barron leads an Extra-Curricular Club – The Debating Society. This lively lunchtime club runs every Monday lunchtime and features a variety of issues and viewpoints! This club offers students the opportunity to develop their critical thinking as well as improve presentation, speech delivery and public speaking skills.

Ms West’s Year 8 Food Preparation and Nutrition students have been preparing and making delicious ‘winter warmer’ vegetable soups. Students demonstrated excellent cutting skills as well as demonstrating a clear understanding of food flavour combinations, texture and reduction. Staff kept popping their heads round the door to remark how delicious the classroom smelled! I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the newest member of our DT team, Mrs Cherry, who joins us as Food Technician. Mrs Cherry (pictured in the below photo) has lots of experience of working within schools and is a very talented chef!

Year 9 Football squad were victorious in the North Kent Cup match fixture this week securing a win against Haberdasher Askes Crayford to take them through to the quarter finals of this prestigious competition. Well done to all involved, great performance!

Our Year 7 PE students are focusing on dance and short tennis this cycle. As with all activities, students begin each session with the ‘do now’ activity where we complete a three-phased warm up. Our Dance students have just completed a Bollywood motif and have now moved on to work on a Disco routine.

As you can see from the first photo, Mr Proctor and his students certainly nailed the ‘John Travolta Swagger’ for their Disco routine (to the Bee Gees track, Staying Alive) Their timing and performance skills were spot on!

Disco routine warm-ups.

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Short tennis warm-up concentrated on shoulder and arm exercises as well as general aerobic routines.

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Student Voice. Our student managers have been contributing to the interview process for the appointment of a new Deputy Head Teacher to work alongside Mr Naylor. Student interviews form an invaluable part of the process providing student insight and feed-back which feeds into the overall decision. Our students are excellent at putting the candidates at ease and making them feel welcome (despite asking some rather tough interview questions!)

Thank you to David, Lilah, Michelle and Scott, who are pictured below - excellent job.

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S18 Careers at Stone Lodge. We are members of the Kent and Medway Careers hub. We have a bespoke careers programme that includes a range of experiences of workplaces, employer visits, and talks from specialist working in various sectors.

This is combined with a whole-school approach to careers learning within the curriculum to help our students appreciate the relevance of subject knowledge and skills in the workplace and understand the progression routes that are available.

Making well-informed decisions about their future careers and subject choices includes access to information about future career prospects and employment possibilities through tools such as Unifrog. We will be reintroducing all students to using UNIFROG again across this term – they log in using their school username and password - but do please look at this with them as it will help to map their complete career journey.

It is important that your child understands the local labour market. We encourage you to support them by looking at a start profile together using this link Start | Local LMI | Careers & Study Information (startprofile.com) Scroll down to Packages and click ‘get started’ on the ‘use it for free’ package section and this will take you to the Explore the Kent Labour Market tab where you can look at different districts.

Over the next couple of weeks students will be completing a survey in school to help us to reflect upon our current provision. Please encourage them to complete this with as much information as possible. This is a link to the survey

We also offer career insight talks to students in Year 9 and 10. We are always looking for new speakers so please get in touch with Mrs Tiddy via gtiddy@stonelodgeschool.co.uk if you are able to offer a talk. We look forward to hearing from you.

Our Year 12 Engineers joined the prestigious Engineering Development Trust Gold Award in Canterbury Christ Church University. The programme is sponsored by BAE Systems and provides invaluable experience of university life and crucially working on a key engineering project with world class equipment and mentor support.

Our students were given the brief of designing a wearable piece of military equipment. They have chosen to make a backpack the deploys a surveillance drone for soldiers on the field. Successful completion of the award results in UCAS points (scores which universities are interested in as part of the admissions process and make offers based on the total number of points). Students are competing with students form Rochester Grammar School to Bow School. They are hoping to win a prize for their project at the awards ceremony later in the year.

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Year 12 students have started their Unit 2: Fitness, Training and Programming for Health, Sport and Wellbeing. This week students got the opportunity to work in the Food technology room to make protein shakes and experiment in creating their own recipes. This was a fantastic opportunity to apply their knowledge in a vocational setting. This work will contribute to giving their case studies recommendations on how to improve their lifestyles.

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