A quick trip to Rome? just one of our Period 7 Opportunities!
All our students are now four weeks into enjoying their first block of period 7 choices for the year. We are really pleased to have been able to offer even more of our students their first choices this year, across all year groups. In their first week our VR Travel club students all headed to Rome and explored the city, making many of us jealous!
New options in Mind include Current Affairs, Voiceovers, UK Maths challenges, STEM Club, Technical Drawing, plus a return of many tried and tested options such as Debate Society, First Aid, Arabic, Politics, Chess, Small Animal Studies and Sign Language.
New options for Soul have included Baking Buddies,the aforementioned VR Travel Club, Design and Make, Model Club and Doodles to Destress. These are offered alongside old favourites such as Ceramics, Board games, Spheros, Manga Drawing, Documentaries, Gardening, Hairdressing, Crochet and Rocket building.
We have consolidated our Body options so more students can do the sports they love, be it as part of the squad or more sociably. This, combined with our lunchtime clubs means we can still offer a wide range of sports – with lunchtime badminton having proved particularly popular. The sports covered include Rugby led by Saracens, Football, Netball, Basketball, Run/Walk, Dance (street dance, dance company and just dance), Gymnastics, Trampolining, Badminton, Boxercise and Table Tennis. Students are more than welcome to join new lunchtime clubs, just see the PE team to sign up.
Our Year 10 students have embraced the opportunity to lead aspects of period 7 for younger students with many active Sports Leaders, Performing Arts Leaders (across both music technology and our Page to Stage programme) running a Community Art project and as trainee group of Mental Health Ambassadors. All this in addition to many new opportunities including Life Skills (which includes learning to shave a balloon!) Textiles projects, learning about Cooking for themselves, solving Life Conundrums and an opportunity to do Watersports.
In addition Year 10 have started their Community and Study Skills Period 7 Sessions. Once a week they focus on Study Skills, a Community Project or Careers based work. Highlights so far include learning all about the Pomodoro study technique and how visual images can support our cognitive links to long term memory, and starting to understand UN Sustainability Goals and Improvement Plan. The study skills sessions of this dovetail with the external run Elevate Education sessions in Year 10, the first of which took place last Friday.
Huge thanks to Saracens who are running four sessions of Period 7 Rugby a week for us, Herts Catering for running two sessions with Year 10, Harpenden Rotary club for starting up our Interact club for Year 9 and to our parent volunteers who come in each week to impart their wealth of knowledge on students on subjects ranging from voiceovers to baking. And finally, I could not end without a massive thank you to our amazing staff team who continue to wow us with their never ending talents – period 7 allows both them and our students to have a fantastic end to the school day.
~ Mrs Coomber, Assistant Head.
