Assemblies this week have focused on our commitment to ensuring that everyone is safe, happy and successful. We’ve revisited our expectations about how we make this happen including looking at how we ensure that our students are successful learners. With that in mind, following our focus last week on groupwork and pair work this week, from our phases of learning, I’m going to look at the ‘Individual work’ that has been taking place in classrooms over the last week.

Year 7 in DT have been doing graphic design work, developing skills in 3D isometric drawing, rendering colour and tone as well as letter creation. In English, as part of the ‘Journeys of Discovery’ theme, students escaped the miserable weather by writing a descriptive account of a day in Cape Town whilst others worked individually to write their narrative blogs about hiking and camping in the great outdoors. 

Year 8 Computing students completed an end of topic assessment on Networks, to demonstrate their understanding of key terms such as WAN’s and LAN’s whilst in English they created detailed director’s notes as they reimagined a chapter from the novel ‘Brother in the Land’ into a scene from a dystopian film.  

Year 9 Geographers have been investigating the Amazon rainforest and the dangers it faces with deforestation. In this week’s lessons, they have started to write up and justify their arguments to the question “Should the Trans-Amazonian Highway be built?”. In French, as part of the ‘My village’ topic, students have been reading a text individually in French.

In Biology, Year 11 students have completed a 6-mark question about how carbon moves through the environment, using the carbon cycle they had completed whilst in English they drafted an essay on ‘A Christmas Carol’ considering the character of Scrooge as an outsider to society. 

Our work with the Behaviour Hub is now well underway with further professional development input from the Hub, a whole staff professional development meeting and a visit from a member of staff from our lead school. You will also have received the letter about the student survey which will take place next week which will support our assessment of our current position, action planning and measuring success. 

As part of our Quality Assurance schedule, we’ve been carrying out Subject Reviews of Geography and History along with colleagues from our federated partner, King James’s School. This has enabled us to take a deeper look into the curriculum, teaching and student progress through a combination of curriculum conversations, lesson observations, data analysis, student views and work scrutiny. 

We have two Parent/Carer evenings coming up in the next couple of weeks. On Wednesday 31st January we have Year 8 Parent/Carer evening with Year 7 the following week on Wednesday 7th February. Both are online and from 4-6.30p.m. Please let us know if you haven’t received the information about making appointments. 

Have a lovely weekend!