Seasonal Slideshow - September Harvest
Saturday’s Open Morning saw the launch of Book Fiesta! Our 5th Annual Book Festival for Readers and Writers. Many visitors were interested to hear about the programme of author visits the Library has arranged for all students, staff and parents from November 10-18th. Please click on this link to see our attractive information brochure.
In addition, our annual Writing Challenge has been launched – a 500 word diary or letter on one of three themes. Winners receive Leaf book tokens and an invitation to our Awards Evening at local Leaf Cafe with illustrator and author James Mayhew as special guest. All entrants earn a House Point for their participation.
Good Luck!
Y9 enjoyed this spectacular demonstration of an exothermic reaction in class this week. They observed the ‘Whoosh Bottle Experiment’, showing how a vapourised flammable fuel is significantly more combustible than the liquid form. They burned a similar quantity of the liquid form and were clearly underwhelmed!
Please take the time to watch the video below:
Whoosh Bottle Experiment from Simon Balle on Vimeo.
In Maths, 7L have been faced with the challenge of constructing their own dart board. This is part of a numeracy project, in which their dart boards will be used to calculate various different things, testing their mental maths skills.
The students have embraced the challenge and have overcome many of the problems they found.
As part of our regular Friday brain tease please see below the answer (on the left) to last week’s sixth form maths challenge as well as the new challenge on the right.
These puzzles are set as a starter for our mathematicians but we like to share them with the wider Simon Balle community each week!
This week the Y13 chemists are learning about the concept of half life in chemical reactions- the idea that as a reaction happens the concentrations of the reactants halve over time.
It is difficult to show this as we cannot count quantities of molecules, so instead we showed it with skittles!
Here you can see them calculating how quickly the number of skittles which land face down and are removed reduce the overall number of skittles. They then used this to calculate the rate and the half life of this ‘reaction’
Congratulations to all those who came along for our annual Roald Dahl Quiz on Friday, celebrating this popular writer’s 100th birthday anniversary. It was great to see about 30 students taking part in teams of 1 or 2. Well done to Lawrence Davis and Charles Winterton 8B who came first, winning a new book each as well as lots of chocolate….
For more details on the runners up please see the photograph. House Points go to the top 3 teams. Please look out for more of our popular quizzes coming later in the term.
Last Friday the Y12 Geography students were invited to a talk about the changing face of Manchester. The talk was given by Mr Grantham who was a student in Manchester in the 1980s.
He told them about the way in which the built environment has changed over the past 30 years and identified places and that they could carry out further research on. The students asked questions about housing and education in Manchester, and there was a discussion about the role of political decisions in shaping urban areas.
The talk provided the students with a valuable starting point for their research on regeneration in Manchester, and will be followed up with a visit to Manchester next half term.
Last Tuesday the primary phase children celebrated 100 years of Roald Dahl by coming to school dressed as one of their favourite Roald Dahl characters or in yellow (his favourite colour). The Larch Centre was filled with BFG’s, Enormous Crocodiles, Matilda’s, Fantastic Mr Foxes to name a few. I know Roald Dahl would have been very proud to see his characters come to life!
Please click on this photo to see some more of the photos we took on the day.
Reception have been reading ‘The Enormous Crocodile’ and spent the week creating their own Enormous Crocodile, the Roly Poly Bird and the other characters from the story. They also all wrote down their own dream for school and posted them into our Dream Jar!
“The Enormous Crocodile was scary because he was trying to eat the children!” Sofia.
“It was funny because The Enormous Crocodile turned into a sausage at the end.” Alfie.
Year 1 have been exploring the story of the BFG and wrote their own dreams for the jar. They made and ate Snozzcumber sandwiches, and dreamcatchers to hang up!
“The dreams will catch in the string and give us happy dreams” Erin.
Raya‘s dream was for everyone to be happy. This certainly came true by the end of the day!
