We hosted our second Taster Day this week for another eighteen Year 6 pupils in local schools, coming to sample a day in the life of a Year 7 pupil at HSW.  They had a good day! As you will see from the photos below, they busied themselves extracting DNA from a strawberry and exploring the electrifying wonders of a Van der Graaf machine, amongst other exciting activities.

Knowledge and understanding cannot always be extracted from a textbook; you need to get up and about, use your senses and find out how the world around you works. This is why I am so very grateful to our hard-working staff who create so many engaging activities, some of which you will see in the pages below.

Engagement is key, but I prefer the word ‘botheredness’. We want our students to be so engaged that they feel bothered to learn, to question and to care. After all, if you don’t care, you don’t try.

Whether they have been riding a horse, creating a Tutankhamun death mask, dissecting a strawberry, exploring the British Museum, or joining together to decorate a Christmas tree, our students have found stimulation this week in all sorts of places – and that’s not bad considering most of them have been tackling their termly academic assessments all week too. I am so very proud of them all.

May I wish you a wonderful weekend and I look forward to seeing you at our inaugural Christmas Variety Show next Friday afternoon – it promises to be a fun hour of entertainment, I can assure you.