Tenacious Translators

30th January 2015Miss A Wootton

Tenacious Translators 2With ‘Challenge Week’ in full swing, Y10 French students were given a full-length chapter of one of the famous Harry Potter books to read, entirely in French.  The students worked as a team and were asked to translate the whole chapter from French into English. The students were not daunted by the unfamiliar vocabulary and used classroom resources to tackle the text independently. They had to work collaboratively and remain resilient. They did not give up even when faced with sentences that at first they didn’t understand. It seems we have some budding translators amongst us – Bon travail!Tenacious Translators 1

This task has helped the Y10 linguists to realise that by falling into the ‘Learning Pit’ they discover new language and push their limits, helping them on their path to success.

Y10 Maths Challenge

30th January 2015Sarah Pope

Y10 Maths fractional indicesOne of the Y10 maths classes have spent a lesson using powers of 2 to discover the rules for negative and fractional indices.
This is an A/A* topic with a class who have C/B grade targets.  After a bit of reluctance at first (and frustration on both sides!) they started to get the idea and eventually some of them discovered the rules.
We started with “This is so confusing” and ended with “Oh, I get the idea now“.

A Smashing Time!

30th January 2015webadmin

MH distanceWe have finally been able to start the demolition of the school bungalow.  This area, once flattened and landscaped will provide us with more parking spaces.  The builders hope that the area will be ready at some point after the half-term break.

If you look closely at the picture you may spot a senior member of staff wearing steel toe cap boots, high viz jacket, work gloves and a hard hat as she ‘took her turn’ in the demolition machine.

Quite a few staff (and students) would also like to have ‘had a go’!

Y12 Constitutional Reform Video Challenge

29th January 2015Michael Moss

Mr Moss’ Y12 Politics group were challenged to produce a stop-motion video on the subject of Constitution Reforms using only a whiteboard, pens, plasticine and a lego model (supplied by Mr Moss’ son!).

They were looking to cut down complicated information into key headlines. There was a lot of discussion on how to visualise and share information. In feedback students said it was hard because they had to really think about the key points and how to synthesise information instead of simply taking notes or answering questions.

Please take time to watch the video they produced.

Y7 Tilted Squares Challenge

29th January 2015Miss S Wren

Y7 Tilted SquaresY7 have been looking at the area of squares once tilted on a grid. It took a while to work out how to calculate the area but they realised that if it was split up into squares and triangles it was possible.
We then looked at the relationship between the tilt, the length across and the area of the square. By the end of the lesson we noticed that the area is the tilt squared add the length across squared.
For their homework Y7 are finding out who Pythagoras was and what his theorem is. We will discuss how this is related to the squares in the next lesson.
Can you work it out?

 

8N Clay Challenge

29th January 2015Mrs B Freeth

8N Clay ChallengeY8 students were challenged to  create clay heads inspired by the sculptures of Modigliani.

As they haven’t worked with clay before, their challenge was to create a prototype to help them discover both unsuccessful and successful ways of working with clay.

During their session they realised that the more you handle it, the quicker it dries out!

 

Y9 English Challenge

28th January 2015Mrs L Cooke

English Y9 challenge LCY9 were given two short stories traditionally studied at GCSE in their English lesson: a comic Hardy story called ‘Tony Kytes- the Arch Deceiver’, written partly  in Wessex dialect and the classic Poe ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ which uses difficult language and a high level of inference to understand.

 

They were given no scaffolding to interpret other than prior knowledge from the short story unit! Using their resourcefulness, they were able to summarise and ask questions about the narratives.

Y10 Pass Level 1

28th January 2015Linda Jones

Y10 Food Safety HygieneCongratulations to our Y10 Catering and Hospitality students who all passed their Level 1 Food Safety Hygiene qualification.

They are now looking forward to preparing for the more challenging Level 2 in the summer term.

Challenge In Y9 Spanish

28th January 2015Elizabeth Ellis

Students had to try to translate a detailed text about a book set in the Spanish Civil War. They worked really well on a task many would not have thought possible for them to tackle.

Slide 1

translation 1

Slide 2

translation 2

Slide 3

translation 3

Challenge In Y8 Geography

27th January 2015Hannah Ahmet

Y8 Geog Challenge WeekY8 kick-started ‘Challenge Week’ in Geography. Students challenged themselves to achieve a higher grade in their recent hazards assessment, by completing tasks from the next level up.

Once finished, some students completed questions from the GCSE and A Level textbooks on the new topic they are studying – Cities.