On Thursday the 11th of July, we welcomed our first Year 7 cohort to Katherine Warington’s transition day. Both staff and students had so much fun taking part in the carousel of activities and we were all keen to finally meet each other! Students arrived from 8am and started gathering in their form groups. There was a lot of hustle and bustle in Park Hall as students got to meet their form tutors and began making new friends. Mr Smith then delivered an assembly to welcome everyone where he expressed how important it was to take this day as an opportunity to meet new people and make new friends.

Once the activities started, the day ran like clockwork as students showed they could be safe and sensible even when taking part in challenging, active and at points noisy activities! Mrs Robinson, our Art teacher, had planned a fantastic challenge where students used milk bottle tops and balloons to create pull and go cars. They then raced the cars at the end to determine winners. Things got rather frantic when Mrs Robinson yelled ‘GO!’ Mrs Coomber our Head of Maths planned a creative puzzle involving marshmallows and spaghetti. Both of these activities challenged our students as young, up and coming engineers! It was at times too tempting not to eat the equipment though…

All students got their chance to let off some steam in Harpenden Sports Hall as Mrs Anderson our Maths and PE teacher led the students in a variety of competitive games. The music was booming and the students thoroughly enjoyed it arriving to their next activities red faced! Other activities included a Spanish session run by Mrs Creamer, Drama run by Mr Church and we managed to get as many students as we could into the University of Hertfordshire’s Planetarium. Students learnt about our solar system and looked up at the night sky, even though it was 24 degrees outside.

To finish the event, students were asked to document this important day by writing a letter to their future selves as part of their English session with Mrs Aikman, our Head of English. Students showed impeccable behaviour as all the students completed the activity in silence, diligently sealing their letters away, ready to be opened in Year 11! This will act as our own little time capsule so we can all remember this significant moment in our school’s history. Mrs Anderson even wrote her own as she thought carefully about her first impressions of Blue form!

It is important we say a huge thank you to the staff that supported us as not only did support staff from KWS come along to help our students as they made their first step into secondary school. We were also lucky enough to have the entire Links outreach team there to help us. We really couldn’t have put on such a fabulous day for the students without this support. It is also important to say thank you to parents for getting all of the right information to us so we could ensure as smooth a transition day as possible.

We hope students were able to come home and tell you they had a positive experience and made some new friends. Hopefully, now students are able to look forward with anticipation to September as they become fully fledged Katherine Warington students.