Dear Parents/Carers
We’ve had a great first week back and our students have returned to school approaching learning in their usual manner – working hard, getting smart and being kind. As always, much has been achieved in one week!
Common Mission
Common Mission started this week for both G28 and G29. This is an hour each week where we personalise our curriculum to support and challenge students to become the best versions of themselves?”. Common Mission provides our students opportunities to uncover and develop passions in areas outside of our core offer, with some students getting additional academic support where appropriate.
For the first time, this weekly session was an opportunity for both year groups to work together. It was a fantastic scene when we walked around sessions and a real testament to the strong culture and community we are building when we saw our students step up to fresh challenges with new people and readily support each other.
This term’s Common Mission sessions are:
Creative Writing; Directed Numeracy; Directed Literacy; Fitness; Mandarin; Mindful Arts; Personalised Research and a STEM project.
Clubs
Our clubs started this week and lunchtimes and after school have been full of activity. Students have enjoyed a real variety of clubs:
Expedition sessions
As always our students have been working hard in sessions striving always for high quality. G29 have been producing beautiful artwork, exploring mark making using mono printing.
G28 showed courage this week in STEAM sessions when they carried out heart dissections. They demonstrated real maturity approaching this challenge, carrying out these experiments with care and precision, working as scientists.
HoWLs – Habits of work and learning
HoWLs snapshots were shared with students in Thoughtful Thursday Crew this week and our students got to see teacher reflections on their HOWLs alongside their own weekly HOWLs self reflections.
There were some real highlights in this snapshot from both G28 and G29. In G29 we now have 42% of students who have achieved an average HoWL of 3.5 and above. This means that they are demonstrating consistently great habits of learning: working hard, getting smart and being kind in all sessions. These students will take greater leadership roles this term and have been offered the opportunity of being the first students to attend a one-day project with one of our careers partners, linked to their current expedition with an architecture focus. More details on this for students involved this week.
G29 students who have demonstrated similar greatness in HoWLs will join our G28 HoWL leaders in student focus groups taking place this term. These are sessions which allow students to work with staff and share their insights on different areas of school (sessions, extended study, clubs, etc) as part of our school improvement and student voice.
Over the next few weeks all students will be working on pledges to improve areas of their HOWLs and these will be shared with you. Crew Leaders and Y8 Crew Buddies will support our new Y7 students with this process.
This week:
We will be taking time this week to work with our students on remembrance of service and the importance of honouring those who serve to defend our democratic freedoms and way of life.
We will explore this in our Crews and take the opportunity to revisit the radio podcast from last year’s ‘Do Your Bit’ G28 expedition which had the guiding question ‘Why do we need to honour all those who sacrificed in WWI?’.
For our new parents who haven’t heard this, here is the link to a really beautiful product from Y7 last year.
I did say that it has been a great week back and we have achieved lots!
Thank you as always for your support and as usual, if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact your children’s crew leader in the first instance.
Julie Mosley
Co-principal