Dear Parents, Guardians and Friends
As many of you will be aware, last week was The Holt’s annual Harvest celebration. Modern Harvest celebrations date all the way back to 1843 when a Cornish Reverend invited people from the parish to a service of thanks with bread made from the new wheat crop.
Whilst our students haven’t been whipping up any bread, nor out in the fields taking in wheat, we have taken time to consider what we consume and our place within our community.
Our theme this year has been water conservation- hardly a surprise after our numerous summer heatwaves and our still surprisingly balmy weather!
To introduce our Harvest theme, the students had assemblies looking at why water conservation matters so much. I cast my mind back to my own school days explaining the finer points of the water cycle, and relayed statistics that I found really surprising, like nearly 1/5 of our clean treated water is lost before it reaches its destination due to leaking pipe networks!
Each of our Houses were then assigned a specific area of life in which to look at saving water:
Broderers: Laundry
Clothworkers: Household appliances and plumbing
Goldsmiths: Cleaning cars and outdoor items
Haberdashers: Gardening and plants
Lacemakers: Washing dishes
Spinners: Shopping, food, and everyday consumption
Tanners: Cooking and food preparation
Weavers: Personal hygiene and bathroom use
Thank you to all the Heads of Houses and their prefects for creating wonderful House assemblies about this important topic and creating such vivid and informative displays.
Our Student Leadership Team then led three Harvest celebration assemblies sharing their own water conservation tips, testing students’ knowledge of water consumption, and- of course- leading us in a rousing chorus of ‘Cauliflowers Fluffy’ (a Holt staple!) We also had Dr Lewis dressed as a mermaid accompanied by some dancing house prefects to reveal the House point totals and the top three Harvest House displays:
1st place: Spinners
2nd place: Broderers
3rd place: Weavers
Following our Harvest assemblies, the prefects and Year 7 and 8 helpers helped us with the big food sort, taking all of the food from the Harvest displays and sorting it into items for distribution on Friday. Thanks very much to our Student Leadership Team for their engaging and informative assembly, and to our food sorting helpers who did a brilliant and very efficient job!
Our wonderful Year 11s left the school at lunchtime on Friday to go in pairs and threes to deliver food bags to residents of over 100 addresses at four sheltered accommodations in Wokingham- a lovely opportunity for us to give back to our community and engage across the generational divide.
We were also able to deliver food to Bracknell Food Bank:
Wokingham Food Bank:
And also to WADE Day Centre:
We so value the opportunity to do this each year and would like to thank all of you who sent in food donations with your daughters for your contributions to this time-honoured Holt tradition.
I shall leave you with a quotation from William Blake:
“In seed time learn, in seed time teach, in harvest winter enjoy.”
So, with it still feeling slightly less than autumnal, we bid goodbye to Holt Harvest for another year. I’m very much hoping that it’ll be time for boots, woolly jumpers, and pumpkin-spiced-everything before too long!
Kind regards,
Elizabeth Harris
Assistant Headteacher