Week ending 6th October

Last week our Modern Foreign Languages department created a series of exciting activities to celebrate different languages and cultures from around the world. Students learned about festivals and traditions from many different countries – from the Moon festival in China to the first day of school sweet cones in Germany. We even re-created a festival ourselves. The ‘Colacho’ festival from the small Spanish town of Castrillo de Murcia, involves a man dressed to represent the devil jumping over new born babies to cleanse them of bad spirits. Our students had a lot of fun recreating this, and fortunately no dolls were harmed during the festival! 

Students also had the opportunity to create ‘Alebrijes’, Mexican spirit animals, and learn to play Mancala, one of the oldest games in the world originating from Africa. It has been great to see students excited to discover and participate in different traditions. Later on this school year, we will continue to share and celebrate students’ home cultures with Culture Day. 

House points have been awarded for the houses with the most participants. 

1st: Hawking; 2nd: Edison; 3rd: Seacole; 4th: Johnson

Ms Clarke, our Head of MFL and of Year 11 is pictured below working with our GCSE Spanish students to further develop their vocabulary skills.  Great work!

Our Year 10 GCSE artists are exploring identity and representation through portraiture.  To deepen their knowledge, students attended a learning session at the National Portrait Gallery.  Students explored how artists convey their identity before attending a creative session where they responded to portraits they had visited and considered how they would convey their own identity.  The session was led by artist Robin-Lee Hall who commented on how engaged, intuitive, and skilled our students were.  Great job!

Introducing Teacher of Art Mrs Dodson who has a wealth of teaching and commercial experience, having held marketing and design roles as well as teaching roles in Kent secondary schools.  In the lesson pictured, Mrs Dodson’s Year 8 students are working on watercolour paintings using the work of artist Mondrian as inspiration.  Students first made pencil drawings to represent their emotions in an abstract design.

“I am impressed by the creative ability and mindset of our students, evident by the huge attendance of our after school Art Club.   Our Club provides hands-on support and materials for students to develop their technique and express themselves through their artwork.  I paint and create macramé pieces in my spare time and am enjoying working alongside our talented students”

Mr Matthews, is both Head of Geography and a published author of fantasy fiction!  So, it’s not surprising that he should run a Dungeons and Dragons lunchtime club … and an exceptionally popular one too!  Dungeons & Dragons is a storytelling game where players take on the roles of different characters within a story. As they play, their characters make friends and enemies, fight monsters, discover treasure, and complete quests.  The ultimate goal of D&D is to tell a story!

Joshua, one of the group’s players is currently reading Mr Matthews latest novel, Seven Deaths of an Empire … a shameless bit of product placement! Mr Matthew’s books can be purchased on Amazon (and in all good bookshops!) by clicking here  Seven Deaths of an Empire eBook : Matthews, G R : Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Introducing Mr Enemuoh, Teacher of Humanities who joins us with extensive teaching experience across the local area.  In the below photos Mr Enemuoh and his Year 7 Geographers have been exploring the United Kingdom in order to create a ‘sense of place’.  By investigating maps and tourist information students have researched a place to go on holiday to in the UK.

 

 

Our Year 9 students attended a financial skills workshop delivered by a specialist financial manager at Adams and Bowles Wealth Management.  The course equips students with essential skills to help them build their financial confidence and promotes greater understanding of financial issues.

The course covers important topics such as budgeting, saving, borrowing, banking, and protection, with all resources holding an external FE Quality Mark by Young Money and endorsed by the Money and Pensions Service.

SL6 Update from our Sixth Form SL6 correspondent Olivia Demetriou-Shaw. Over the course of the last few weeks SL6 have had the opportunity to work with the investment company M&G. M&G have been running career development sessions and workshops that can help us with our future aspirations. The last two sessions have been focusing on writing compelling CVS and cover letters - two key components that any individual will need when applying for jobs or apprenticeships within the working world. Rob, the host provided us with different examples of CVS and cover letters to assess and evaluate what elements make the documents most appealing to the interviewer. 

Each workshop focuses on different skills and qualities that will help us throughout our careers. Including focusing on confident public speaking and teamworking skills. Rob outlined skills companies will look for when applying for roles or jobs within your future. He made us aware of different interview processes including online, written and face-to-face. We worked on a task where we were challenged to write a presentation or campaign for an investment company to encourage the public to buy investment schemes. Using research and feedback from everyone in the group we were challenged to be as creative as possible to articulate our ideas demonstrating both successful teamwork and presentation skills. The task was beneficial in creating stronger bonds as a cohort and building confidence in public speaking.

We also worked on developing our CVS and letters to form the basis of a personal statement and how best to adapt and present information for different application processes.  We have enjoyed developing our knowledge and understanding of the employment and further education sectors and are looking forward to the next sessions and extending our skillset further.

Our school hosted a secondary school trainee teacher session for the University of Greenwich.  The university students have just started their school placements (part of their training before qualifying) and visited our school as a showcase of a North Kent non-selective school.  The Lead lecturer sent the below feed-back and thanks to our school staff and students;

“I just wanted to extend a heartfelt thanks to you all for making Monday such a successful and impactful experience for my secondary trainees.

The keynote by Mr Barnett was pitched at just the right level for them providing context, guidance, and excellent examples of how to create a positive climate for promoting purposeful learning experiences. We appreciated being able to see the school ‘in action,’ something he is justifiably very proud of. Trainees were very impressed by the routines that had clearly been established by all teachers, the excellent behaviour of pupils, the calmness around the school and the strong working relationships and rapport that teachers had formed with the pupils in their lessons regardless of subject and year group.  Our trainees were incredibly impressed by the whole school and very grateful for having this opportunity.”

Roz, Senior Lecturer at University of Greenwich (pictured with me below)

Forthcoming Dates;

Year 11 Career Interviews till 14^th November

Year 6 Open Evening – 12 October

Last Day of Term 1 – 20 October

Year 13 Grade Reports sent home – 20 October

First Day of Term 2 – 2 November

 

Best wishes,

Mr Gavin Barnett

Head Teacher