This week’s blog has been written by Harry Bryan 11E, as part of National Takeover Day.
National Takeover Day
Today, 15 students from Years 10 and 11 took over a variety of teachers’ roles across the school, teaching lessons, attending meetings and writing reports as part of the National Takeover Challenge. The boys demonstrated their leadership and communication skills by organising and delivering lessons to their classes.
Over the course of takeover day, Sam Gilbert and Hugo Oh Graham went around the school and interviewed takeover teachers, real teachers and their classes. Most takeover teachers were extremely successful, motivating their classes to get lots of work done, while still having fun. The amount of positive feedback from the teachers was great. When Mrs Brooking was asked how she thought John Scarfe (her takeover teacher) was performing, she said “Based on his performance I would have to give him 10 out of 10 so far” and “John knows some of the boys because they’re friends with his brother, and was a little bit concerned that they might be playing up a bit but they’ve been on top form really really really good and responsive”. Almost all of the classes loved the change, and thought that it was a wonderful experience, and would love to have their takeover teachers again. Overall, I think that takeover day was massively successful, and it is a great experience.
Skype with Syria
Earlier on this week Mrs Green organised a Skype call between Year 8 DHSB students and our partner school in Syria.
Mrs Green said: “The Geography department are working with UNRWA (United Nations Refugees and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees) on the My Voice My School project. My Voice My school focuses on the topic of quality education, one of the UN Global Goals. DHSB is connected with an UNWRA school in Homs, Syria. We will be having a series of skype calls whilst working on a project enabling student voice to develop and ensure all children have access to a quality education.
This week 8W had their first skype call to Homs, Syria. At times this was a technically challenging experience and a little stilted to start with. As the conversation developed and the students were sharing questions and answers it became a much less awkward situation. Our students even taught the children in Homs to ‘dab’ and they all ended up singing a Justin Bieber song together!
As Homs and Aleppo have this week come under new air strike offensives our students have demonstrated their concerns for the students we are building a relationship with. We wait now until our next Skype in January, but will definitely be keeping them in our thoughts. We have only just started the project, but already the power of education has become irrefutable.”
Excellent Work
In Mr Roberts’ blog at the beginning of the year, he talked about starting a new feature about excellent work. As a community we strive to develop and achieve excellence, and that he believes that it is important to give recognition to those who produce outstanding pieces of work, so he now hopes to include examples of excellent students’ work on his blog every week.
‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit’ – Aristotle.
Artwork:
This week Mrs Burdon has sent us a range of artwork from pupils in years 7-11, she says: “The art department has been celebrating excellent work highlighting pupil art stars each week through the window of twitter @Staffaburdon #dhsbartstars. We strongly believe that pupils should have a platform to show their work and achievements to a wider audience as creativity is fundamental to learning. It is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. It allows pupils to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections and to generate solutions. Creativity involves two processes: thinking, then producing. The images posted on twitter reflect this learning.”
#dhsbartstars this week are Mr Heads year 10 GCSE class .
DHSB art stars this week are 8E’s amazing self portraits inspired by street artists Sunil Pawar
DHSB art stars this week are 8E’s bold, bright street art designs
DHSB art star this week is 7P Finlay Morgan’s amazing drawing inspired by Durer.
DHSB art star this week is Jake Cooneys 11N fantastic analyses on Banksy
Reuben Dartnell’s beautiful photomontage inspired by Douglas Kolk .
Christmas Card Competition:
Congratulations to Logan Davies 11S, who won the DHSB Christmas Card design competition. He produced this photograph, and was awarded a £10 voucher for his efforts.
Devonport Market Hall
Earlier this week our DHSB Digital Leaders supported the VIP launch night of Devonport Market Hall. The Market Hall aims to be a new hub for innovation and technology. Partnered with Plymouth City Council, City college Plymouth, Real Ideas Organisation, and i-DAT.org it’s a space where local businesses are able to rent out tech spaces, where they’re able to use state-of-the-art equipment and develop new products. Our Digital leaders hope that it will bring the digital community together. Mr Shahin says that “It went really well, we developed lots of new relations with local businesses that we hope to work with in the future. Our students demonstrated great networking skills”
Great Geography Map Off
In Fridays year 10 geography lessons, pupils took part in a survey called The Great Geography Map off, which encourages young people to consider the effects of their actions on the environment. Andrew Brown, who acted as Mrs Greens replacement for the day said: “Today in our Geography lessons we have had the opportunity to take part in the Great Geography Map Off. This is an online survey including questions on many different aspects of Geography. These questions help stimulate the minds of the students and test what they already know about carbon footprint. This is vital, because with global warming becoming an increasing threat to the survival of many different animals, we need to educate people about it. Once they had answered the questions, we looked at what the majority of the class thought, and began to discuss and debate which answers they chose, and why.”
Sports Update
Swimming:
Alex Weatherhead 9S recently represented DHSB in the National County Tem Championships over 2 days in Sheffield. He competed in the 50m freestyle and the 100m backstroke for Cornwall, well done Alex!
Quicksticks Hockey Volunteers:
A group of 9 DHSB Hockey players went and supported the Plymouth School Sports Partnership’s Primary School Quicksticks Hockey event over at the Brickfields centre on 14th October. Fred Williams, Woody Mabbott, Oscar Burnard, Tom Doyle, Sean Rump, Will Turpin, Sam O’Connell, Ollie Gozzard and Seb Ingham volunteered as officials and were excellent in organising the event and ensuring the event was completed smoothly.
Football:
Year 10 are into fourth round of the National Schools Football Cup after beating Penryn College 3-0 on Tuesday.
Sixth Form first team lost 1 – 0 to Plymouth University on Wednesday.
Our Year 9 football team are through to the fifth round of the National Schools Football Cup after a 2-0 victory over Penryn College.
Basketball:
U15s beat Coombe Dean 46 – 27.
U12s finished third in Plymouth for their age group – well done!
