Our third year of the Step Up program has finished, and it's been a fantastic year! This Saturday, our Class of 2017 graduated, and celebrated with a fete they had designed. Pupils arrived early this morning to try their graduation gowns on, then joined their parents, carers and family in the main hall for our celebration ceremony. This consisted of speeches from our dedicated Heroes and teachers, as well as a highlights video to reflect on everything that's been achieved this year. Everyone was called onto the stage for a graduation certificate, and some also received awards for their high attendance! Following the ceremony, pupils gathered outside for our Class of 2017 photo, then had their individual graduation portraits taken in a photo booth (see the link at the bottom of this post). The day ended with our annual Step Up Fete, where all of the activities were planned and run by students, ranging from refreshments tables to raffles, competitions and a beat the goalie game. Everyone enjoyed the food, activities and music, and to finish the day, we held our rocket launch! Students gathered round to compete with the bottle rockets and launch pads they had designed over the last term in sessions. It was a fantastic way to end another great year of Step Up. We are all incredibly proud of the progress that have been made by this year's group, and would also like to thank parents, carers and families for their support of the program. Thank you also to the Heroes and teaching staff for volunteering their Saturdays!
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Following our fantastic Wales residential trip last week, today marks our final Step Up session before our huge Graduation Ceremony! We made the most of our Literacy, Numeracy and Creativity sessions by preparing for next week's celebrations. Numeracy - in our numeracy session today, we were testing out some of our games ideas for the Step Up fete! Dividing into groups of two or three, students engaged with a variety of fun activities involving dice throwing and coin flips. Students recorded their results on worksheets and competed against one another to see who would win. Literacy - following the fantastic Wales residential trip last week, we were writing letters! Students wrote to the Trewern Outdoors Centre, thanking them for the exciting weekend, describing in detail all of the activities they'd tried for the first time - from rock climbing to gorge-walking and canoeing. Students who didn't attend the Wales trip also wrote letters, to their parents, describing how their Step Up experience has taught them over the past year, and created some extra posters to advertise the fete next week. Creativity - our bottle rocket project last term was hugely successful, and we'll be launching them next week! In preparation, each group added the finishing touches to their launchpads. This involved lots of hands-on work, from sanding down wood, to painting with vibrant colours. We can't wait to see the finish results next week at the fete. REMINDER TO PARENTS AND PUPILS: next Saturday will be our Graduation Ceremony and Fete. Come and celebrate with us! Pupils must wear formal clothing for the Graduation but may bring a change of casual clothes for the fete. Please arrive at 10 for a 10:30 start to the Graduation Ceremony. The Fete will begin at 1:30 - invite our friends! See us enjoying our penultimate week, in the slideshow below: Step Up is back for its last term of the year - it's gone so fast! This term is short but packed with lots of exciting activities. Next week, students will be at Wales on our annual residential trip, and our graduation and fete is soon after. Numeracy - in preparation for the Step Up fete in just three weeks, today's activity was to design some games that would help us to raise money for charities. Students got creative with their ideas, ranging from classic Fete games to raffles and competitions against teachers. It was really fun to draw our ideas, and some even got to making parts of their games. Towards the end of the session, students pitched their game ideas and the Heroes acted as judges, so we could choose which ones will be used in the Step Up Fete. Literacy - this week's theme was all about identity. Firstly, the class discussed what elements make up a person's identity, using examples of famous people such as Michael Jackson. Everyone then completed as worksheet about their own identity, by mind-mapping six ideas about what people can see, and what parts of their identity are beneath the surface. Creativity - Miss Smith-Henry led the groups today in designing posters for our upcoming Step Up Fete, which will take place on the same day as the Step Up graduation ceremony. Students were tasked with inputting important details about the event into PowerPoint, as well as colourful images to create some eye-catching posters. Students also used the Step Up blog to find photos from last year to incorporate into their designs. Look out for the final posters around school! Here are the students on their first day back: Numeracy - following some Ninja Maths challenges, teams reassembled and finished choosing what materials to buy, then set to work with the construction task. We're using bottles to make our rockets, and will launch them in a competition soon, so our teams were dedicated in designing the most aerodynamic and fast rocket. Literacy - carrying on from last week, we looked at human rights in more detail. Firstly, students independently read through a list and labelled each human right with what its topic was, such as "standards of living." Students then used their personal opinions to decide which five human rights were the most important to them - from education, to protection and freedom. We then created some leaflets to educate others, based on the human rights we valued most! Creativity - over the last few weeks, teams from the rocket building challenge in maths have been designing launch pads for when we put our creations to the test. This week, after our plans were finalised, we used Design Technology skills to create the launch pads. After donning some masks, goggles and gloves, students cut the shapes of their launch pads, and spray painted them using bright colours and stencils. They all look fantastic so far. See our students getting creative below! Numeracy - we're almost at the end of term, which means our rocket building project is near completion! To kick off today's session, Miss Ottley challenged the groups to a Ninja Maths worksheet, where we raced through some quickfire questions. We then moved onto buying the materials needed for the rockets planned last week, using the cheques that the financial advisers of each group designed. Literacy - continuing the theme of human rights, today groups looked at a real life case study, from the Amnesty International charity. Firstly, students discussed the definitions of some key words, such as equality, family and dignity, then Miss Modi explained the case of Khun Kawrio. In a circle, students suggested great words for the emotions it made them feel - then we got to writing our solidarity letters! Using a framework to write a formal letter, students made some fantastic efforts putting their opinions of human rights issues to paper. Creativity - creativity was spent in the DT workshop today! In their groups, students finalised launch pad plans for the bottle rockets, in terms of what it will look like and the technical measurements. Once everything was decided, some students then moved on to starting to use materials to construct thei launch pads. Have a look through the slideshow below to see our students enjoying their sessions! Numeracy - last week, we spent our session calculating budget costs for rocket building. This week was all about paying for our supplies! The CEOs of each team directed their groups in finishing calculating costs, and writing out cheques to cash in to Miss Ottley for each type of supply needed. Some of us then went onto planning what the rocket will look like. Literacy - our theme today was all about human rights! Firstly, the groups watched some videos about human rights issues and definitions, then discussed together what the term meant. Students then organised themselves into a line across the classroom, to show their opinions on universal human rights. After writing down some notes and definitions in books, we then got creative and made some posters to advertise what we believed in! We made lots of posters to advocate for different types of rights, from religion to education. Creativity - today's session was all about linking our creative skills to the rocket building project in maths! Initially, the groups watched some videos on different ways to build water bottle rockets, in order to learn about the tools needed. Next, students independently applied their new knowledge to designing the appearance of their rocket. Everyone put in a lot of effort into making their rocket look fantastic, and planning the technical parts such as the size and the tools needed. Here's a slideshow of all the things students got up to this week! Numeracy - today's numeracy session continued the planning for our rocket project! After pupils gathered into teams and chose their job roles, we used the NASA information packs to look into our budget costs for rocket building. Today was all about budget projection; the financial advisers within each team led the way completing a worksheet about the costs of materials needed to build the rockets. Literacy - our focus this session was on autobiographies, a new style of writing we haven't explored before. Firstly, we discussed the features of an autobiography as a group, then defined some keywords often associated with them. Students then had a really fun time planning and writing the opening paragraphs of their own life story, based at their primary school or Oasis! We also read some extracts, as a class, from famous autobiographies such as Jackie Daydream by Jacqueline Wilson. Creativity - to begin the session, we recapped our key ring making project from last term, including all of the key skills and equipment we'd learnt about. Sir then introduced the latest creativity project, which is based around 'the built environment.' After learning some key phrases such as infrastructure, we designed our ideal holiday island resorts. Next week, we'll be using an online website to bring them to life. Here's our students hard at work! Numeracy - today's numeracy session was in an ICT suite! We started off looking at problem solving, then found the Times Tables Rock Star website online. Students (heroes and teachers too) created their own rock star characters, then competed against one another in a race to complete the most multiplication a division questions. The challenge became very competitive - all of the students were eager to show of their mental maths skills. Literacy - continuing with our dystopian theme, today was about planning and writing a story. We began the lesson with a challenge to describe a character from the selection Miss Williamson provided, then some brave students read their descriptions aloud to the class, so others could guess the character. Using the skills we've developed in writing about senses, students then planned out their whole story, by writing detailed descriptions of the dystopian world. Everyone's efforts were fantastic! Creativity - we're at the end of the half term, and so we're nearly finished with our keyring projects. Students new to Step Up made some fantastic plans for their keyrings today, whilst others continued creating theirs! With the help of teaches and heroes, the acrylic material was glued together, cut and polished down into the shapes each student wanted to use. They're looking really great so far! Here are the Step Up staff and students enjoying their projects: Notice: this week was our last week of term! We'll see you again in two weeks time. Please check the calendar for term dates, and look out for texts!
Numeracy - we spent the last two weeks looking at different types of graphs and charts, then did some physical activity to collect data for our own. After writing out our results from last week and discussing what they mean, we created predictions for what a graph of these numbers might show. Students then spent the rest of the lesson plotting and creating their own scatter graphs, to prove their prediction! Literacy - today's focus in literacy was the apocalypse. To change it up a little from last week, students used poetry to write about this theme! After Miss Williamson explained lots of different elements of poetry, such as auditory imagery, students either used an example poem starter or wrote their own independently. Everyone produced some fantastic work. Creativity - last week, we planned out our keyring projects, and today we started to create them! In our Design Technology workshop, students finished off their designs on paper, then chose what colours of acrylic they wanted for their keyrings. Sir then used a machine to cute the materials to sizes, which Heroes then helped students glue together. Here are the Step Up students getting creative: Numeracy - we began our numeracy session with a tough challenge - 150 maths questions to race through! All the students did fantastically at challenging themselves with the questions, getting them correct and working together if a task was difficult. After marking our work, we continued last week's project of collecting information - measuring heartbeats after walking and running, to put into graphs. Literacy - our focus in literacy today was the opposite of last week - we were looking at Utopian worlds! After learning what this meant, as a class we brainstormed what makes us happy, and what we liked the least. Each student started to plan what our ideal, Utopian world would be like - what we wanted it to have, and what was banned from that world. We then wrote letters to other students or family members, describing the world we had created using the five senses. Creativity - our new topic in creativity requires a new space for our sessions. Today, we were in the Design Technology workshop! The project for the next few weeks will be to design and create our own personal keyrings, using a symbol that represents ourselves. To begin planning what we'd like on our keyrings, we brainstormed lots of facts about ourselves - such as names, family, pets, and things important to us - on spider diagrams. Some students then moved on to designing the appearance of our keyrings. Here's a slideshow of what we got up to: |
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