POLY PERSPECTIVE SPRING 2015
Contents
P
arent View
Welcome..............................................................................2 World Book Day 2015............................................................3 School Council News...............................................................4 Year 9 Mural Project................................................................4 Geography A Level Fieldwork Residential .........................5 The Scottsboro Boys...............................................................5 Public Speaking Workshop......................................................5
Calling all parents and carers. At Woolwich Poly we are always interested to find out your views on how we are doing; your opinions are important to us. Ofsted have developed a website where you are able to answer questions on the school, which allows us to shape our future priorities. We kindly ask that you spare a few minutes to complete the form found at the following website address: http://parentview.ofsted.gov.uk/ Please contact the school if you would like more details.
Red Nose Day........................................................................6/7 Geology Club............................................................................8
W
elcome
As you will see from the contents of this magazine, the school has been extremely busy over the last term. Our students have achieved numerous sporting successes and have experienced a wealth of extra-curricular activities; we have much to celebrate in this edition.
This degree is in partnership with Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London. This is another truly remarkable achievement for Woolwich Poly. We hope that you find the information in this newsletter both interesting and informative.
The Department for Education (DfE) has recently published school performance tables which includes 2014 exam data. We are delighted to report that we are now rated “Number 1” in a table of 55 similar schools, nationally, for our GCSE results. These results confirm that our students are getting an outstanding education as verified by both Ofsted and the DfE. As our current Year 11 and sixth form prepare for their final term, the culmination of many years of compulsory education, we wish them every success in their forthcoming examinations. We know that they have been working very hard and many have been putting extra hours of work in after school and on Saturdays as part of their preparation. We would also like to thank the numerous staff who are working so hard to support the achievement of every single student. We are thrilled that Woolwich Polytechnic School will become the first ‘11 – 21’ school in the country by offering university level education. We will be delivering a 3-Year Maths degree (BSc Hons) with Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) from September 2015 – the first course of its type anywhere in the UK.
Important dates for your diary
Tim Plumb
(subject to change, please check school website)
13th April 2015 - Start of term
25-29th May 2015 - Half Term
20th April 2015 - Democracy Week
1st June 2015 - Start of term
22nd April 2015 - School closes at 12.30pm
7th July - UCAS Evening
22nd April 2015 - 1.00pm - Year 11 Intervention
8th July 2015 - Sports Evening (tbc)
22nd April 2015 - 1.30pm - Year 10 ARD
10th July - ARD for Year 7-10
22nd April 2015 - 4.00pm Sixth Form ARD
14th July - KS3 Prizegiving
4th May 2015 - May Day bank holiday - school closed
17th July 2015 - End of Term
21st May 2015 - 1.30pm - New intake interviews
Byron Parker
W
orld Book Day
World Book Day was designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, and is marked in over 100 countries around the globe. World Book Day is a partnership of publishers, booksellers and interested parties who work together to promote books and reading for the personal enrichment and enjoyment of all. A main aim of World Book Day in the UK and Ireland is to encourage children to explore the pleasures of books and reading by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own. Here at the Poly we celebrated World Book Day with book prizes for the top readers in Year 7 and staff joined in the spirit by dressing up as characters from books!
Can you guess the character and book?
S
chool Council News
We have a very exciting time ahead of as us a student council but I would just like to reflect on a major achievement from earlier this year. We were asked by the Mayor of London’s office to come to City Hall and receive Special Recognition Award which was to commend our tireless work on keeping the local roads safer for our students and local community. A good day was had by all and we even got to see the poppies from the top of City Hall. We are also kicking off our Bike Loan scheme. For a £20 deposit the boys will receive lessons on how to maintain their bikes, how to ride them on the roads safely, the bike and safety gear. We are encouraging boys who take out the bikes to ride to school where there will be a reward if they regularly ride into school. If your son is interested they can get a letter from either Nicki or Ms Azman after the Easter holidays. Due to the massive appeal of the new soups in the canteen (90p for soup and fresh bread) we will also be running a competition where boys can create recipes for soup which will then be sold in the canteen. There will be monthly themes and they can enter their own recipes for the chance to win meals and pass to the front of the cue for the week that their soup is being served, the monthly winners will also be put in to find the ultimate student created soup. Boys need to look out for posters around school for when it will start.
Y
ear 9 Mural Project
A HUGE thank you to the Year 9 boys who are taking part in this project and give up their free time after school each week:
Over the past four months, seven Year 9 GCSE Art students, Paul Gurung 9S1 carefully selected by their art teachers to help enhance their creative skills, have been involved in a special project in collaboration with Mulgrave Early Years Centre, situated locally in Woolwich. Mazino Arutoghor 9W1 The students have been creating large scale nursery rhyme/story characters, such as The Gruffalo, Three Little Pigs and Humpty Dumpty, all of which will be installed onto a full scale mural located in the entrance corridor of the early years centre. The aim of this project is to capture the imagination of the children who attend Mulgrave Early years, as well as to enrich the centre’s recently opened library, encouraging all of their children to improve and enjoy reading. The students from the Poly have also greatly benefited from the project, enhancing their large scale drawing and painting skills, as well as team work and collaboration skills- a huge factor in today’s creative industries. Another trip to the centre is soon to take place to complete the mural and add the characters.
Yousaf Ahmed 9S1 Divon Ball 9B1 Charlie Archer 9B1 Kursat Sasmaz 9S1 Varun Abrol 9S1 During our first trip, these boys were fantastic representatives of the school, being respectful and polite to members of staff and children. All of those at Mulgrave who have seen the corridors progress were amazed by the talent of the Poly boys involved. A special thank you to our Art Technician, Christine Wiltshire, for helping the boys with the mural and offering her artistic talents to the project. A big thank you to Bethan Jones, Assistant Head of Mulgrave Early Years for co-ordinating the project.
G
eography A Level Fieldwork Residential
“The trip to Juniper Hall that took place from 28th January 2015 – 30th January 2015 help me to solidify my understanding of rivers and applying it to my fieldwork. By collecting data centred around Part of the A level course is to complete a fieldwork investigation. the River Tillingbourne and at different points of the river’s course I We are lucky enough to use the Field Studies Council centre at could apply my knowledge of channel characteristics to help decide Juniper Hall. The aim is to put their rivers knowledge into practise and also enhance their investigative skills to test the Bradshaw Theory. if the results I collected supported the geographical theories the investigation was related to and what I knew previously. It also gave them the opportunity to use equipment commonly used by engineers – an auto-level and ranging staff. Despite the cold we “The staff at the centre were informative and concise and helped us spent 3 days standing in rivers and taking various measurements, to collate our prior knowledge that we learnt in the classroom and sketching and photographing landforms such as meanders and oxbow adding it to the context of our research which helped to clarify our lakes and finished the day off by spending time in the classroom understanding.” presenting and evaluating results. Hien Nguyen Yr12 Ms. S. Gurney
T
he Scottsboro Boys
On the 28th January Ms Brown organised ANOTHER mystery trip, this time to The Garrick Theatre in London. When we arrived, all was revealed, we were there to see a fantastic musical called The Scottsboro Boys. It was a very insightful trip and the show didn’t only educate us historically but also kept us highly entertained. The storyline was very powerfully thought provoking and intensely moving. The cast were amazing and the singing and dancing was absolutely brilliant. It was hard to believe that such serious subjects as rape and racism were portrayed in such an upbeat way. We were all pleasantly surprised with the gripping performance. Overall, the trip was deemed a success as the students left feeling morally enriched and refreshed with a new understanding of justice. We would highly recommend taking that chance by delving into a mystery trip. Isabel Armah & Lilian Ukaegbue – Year 12
P
ublic Speaking Workshop
“Ladies and gentleman, my name is… and I am going to speak to you about…” It’s a short and simple line but how short and simple is it when you have to deliver it in a lecture theatre full of people? People that are looking at you, scrutinising you and waiting for you to impress them?. On 4th and 9th December 2014 a public speaking workshop took place that was co-funded by Jack Petchey’s Foundation and by Woolwich Polytechnic School. On both days, an external trainer came to improve speaking skills of the G&T boys who were selected. In a short period of 3 hours boys learnt the basic rules of public speaking and delivered their speeches. Topics varied from tolerance, religion to ethics of the modern medicine. And not all boys found speaking easy: “At first, I thought that I would rather die than speak out to a group of people”; however, in the end the experience for all was thoroughly positive : “but today I have gained confidence and knowledge to speak out.” It was extraordinary to be able to assist in the workshop and see our pupils find their voice. A voice that all of them used to speak about deep things, issues that matter not only to them but to the society. Apart from eloquence they showed maturity, humour and wisdom and we hope that they are going to use their voice to spread them!
D T HA
E H T ID
W
? O D Y L PO
Events on the day included: Staff and students paid £1 to wear a red item of clothing Sixth form female students paid £1 to wear men’s suits for the day
Three brave male members of staff were sponsored to have their legs waxed! Staff Bake Off - Three cakes were entered, with Ms. E. Malyan announced the winner with her Poly themed cake! After a whole school vote, Ms. Kouame was the unlucky member of staff to face a dunking in custard and beans!
We raised £1090.31 on the day, and this will be doubled by the Government to a grand total of £2180.62!
Since its launch in 1988, Red Nose Day has become something of a British institution. It’s the day, every two years, when people across the land can get together and do something funny for money at home, school and work.
WH
AT I S
There’s a fantastic night of TV on the BBC, with comedy and entertainment to inspire the nation to give generously.
RED
NOS
Comic Relief spends the money raised by Red Nose Day to help people living tough lives across the UK and Africa.
E DA Y?
COMIC RELIEF - FACTS & FIGURES MALARIA Comic Relief will have helped to protect over 6 million people from malaria in Africa
MONEY RAISED
EDUCATION
8 February 1988 First Red Nose Day - £15 million raised
Comic Relief will have helped over 1 million children in Africa and the world’s poorest countries to get an education.
15 March 1991 Red Nose Day - £20 million raised
10 March 1989 Red Nose Day - £27 million raised 12 March 1993 Red Nose Day - £18 million raised 17 March 1995 Red Nose Day - £22 million raised
HIV
14 March 1997 Red Nose Day - £27 million raised
Comic Relief will have helped 3 million people affected by HIV in Africa.
12 March 1999 Red Nose Day - £35 milion raised 16 March 2001 Red Nose Day - £55 million raised 14 March 2003 Red Nose Day - £61.6 million raised
MENTAL HEALTH
11 March 2005 - Red Nose Day - £65 million raised
Comic Relief has supported the Time To Change campaign to help end discrimination towards people with mental health problems.
13 March 2009 - Red Nose Day - £82 million raised
16 March 2007 - Red Nose Day - £67 million raised 18 March 2011 - Red Nose Day - £108.4 milion raised 15 March 2013 - Red Nose Day - £100 million raised
YOUNG PEOPLE Since 1998, Comic Relief has helped over 120,000 young people at risk of or who have experienced sexual exploitation or trafficking.
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Comic Relief has helped to establish the National Domestic Violence Helpline, which has received over 1.5 million calls since it was set up in 2003.
13 March 2015 - Red Nose Day - £78 million raised (so far!)
On this Red Nose day, 13th March 2015, the total amount raised by Comic Relief reached more than £1 Billion!
G
eology Club
The contacts between each layer can now be seen as long lines in the cliffs towering above the main highway around Iceland, Route 1 (marked in red in Figure 3).
“A picture tells a thousand words”
But how did the cliffs form? We discussed the origin of cliffs in the UK and other areas and figured out that it must have been a coastal Most recently in Geology Club, we analysed a photograph (Figure 1) process with weathering and erosion playing a key part. So, the sea taken by Mr Wood on a trip to Iceland. Our aim was to understand must have been present at some stage but sea level is currently much the processes that have shaped Iceland including many different elements of geography and geology and told quite an interesting story, lower. This meant there was some more working out to do. once we’d worked it out! Mr Wood then introduced us to the concept of isostasy – the depression and/or rebound of land when a weight (in this case ice) is placed on it. During Iceland’s history it has always been home to a large ice mass due to its position close to the Arctic Circle. Climate change since the ice age had caused melting of this ice mass and so the land has rebounded or bounced back up. This means that sea level, which once eroded the cliffs in the photo, is now much lower relative to the cliffs it formed.
Figure 1
During the lesson we focused on the photograph and used our understanding of Iceland’s formation as well as other geographical processes to tell the story of the landscape.
We then wondered about the melting of this ice and if it shaped the cliffs at all. To explain the deep descending cracks (marked in blue), we could tell that once the ice started melting, it became a river flowing back into the sea which cut into the rock to form waterfalls, leaving behind gorges. Modern examples of these waterfalls can be seen at Skogarfoss and Seljalandsfoss (Figure 2), both of which fall over similar cliffs. As the ice continued to melt, the land rose causing sea level to fall relative to the coastline. The glaciers melted and created rivers, waterfalls and gorges. Then, as sea levels retreated further, new plains around Iceland became available for human use.
Figure 2
Finally, the scree (marked in yellow) was our final mystery. Iceland still has a cold oceanic climate and so, from our study of coastal weathering, we proposed that freeze-thaw weathering had continued to wear down the cliffs after the ice and sea had retreated. This left the final scree slopes that flank the cliffs today. Figure 3
Firstly, we identified distinct contacts between each layer of lava produced by the constructive plate boundary. As lava was erupted from Iceland’s central ridge system these lava sheets were laid down up to 2.6 million years ago.
Woolwich Polytechnic School Hutchins Road Thamesmead LONDON SE28 8AT Email: enquiries@woolwichpoly.co.uk Website: www.woolwichpoly.greenwich.sch.uk Telephone: 0208 310 7000
So, from one simple image we were able to tell a lot about this history of Iceland; how different forces acted on its evolving geology and how isostatic rebound and changing the sea levels have affected the way Iceland looks today. Mahmood Shakoor (13A2)