Dear Parent, Guardians and Friends
Another week of lock down ticked off………..at least we have had more great weather to enable some outside studying……until this week…….!
On Thursday will be sending out some “bridging work” to our Year 11 students to help keep them engaged over the next few weeks. This voluntary work includes wider reading tasks and some research based tasks around the subjects they are going to study at A level. We would encourage our students to take this up and to feel free to ask their teacher any questions they might have.
We have also been lucky enough to secure two free on line learning packages for both Year 11 and Year 13 students. The first one, called Eton X, supplied by Eton College is based on interview skills and a second package is from Nebula Learning which is a financial awareness package….perfect for students aged 16-18. All information and logins have been sent out and so we would encourage all Year 11 and 13 to really take up this opportunity as well.
Year 10 students are working hard on their “remote” PPEs at the moment. Another “first” for us, but none the less an important thing to do to enable us to keep some routine going…with some flexibility, as well as give students a great opportunity to consolidate knowledge from the year.
We are planning to hold “remote” KS3 assessments as well later this half term. No doubt we will learn a lot from how the Year 10 PPEs went, but we feel revising and consolidating work is a really good and specific thing to do in “lockdown”………. and more straight forward than learning new content. A separate letter has gone out to all parents of Year 7, 8 and 9 students outlining the assessments in more details along with time lines and guidance.
As well as carrying on with their studies we are also encouraging our Key Stage 3 students to engage in some remote community work…….former student Laura Burrows who is currently taking a gap year volunteering at Glebelands Care Home has invited our students to become “penpals” to the elderly residents. They are not able to see their friends and family at the moment and some of them are quite lonely. Laura thought that letters, emails and pictures from our students would cheer them up- particularly as we approach VE day, which the residents were planning on celebrating. Miss Harris, our charity co-ordinator is leading the project and is sending an email to all Key Stage 3 students giving them the details on how to be involved. Please do encourage your daughter to take part in this great community project. The email for all letters and pictures is glebelands@holt.wokingham.sch.uk.
I don’t know about you, but I have been really enjoying the programme “Race Across The World” as recommended to me by Mrs Bellis…..well Miss Cardy and the PE department have been organising their own “race across the world” for students and staff. The idea was we all send in the number of kilometres s we have covered over a given period of time, either walking, running or cycling, and they work out how far we would have travelled.
As you can see below, between us we covered a staggering 5116 km! Enough to take us to various corners of the world!
Well done to everyone, great effort and thanks to Miss Cardy for organising this.
Stay safe!
Katie Pearce
Co-Headteacher