Coniston Waterpark 16

The students absolutely excelled and we saw beautiful moments of teamwork and kindness as stronger members of the group threw their hands down to help pull other pupils up some of the more challenging stretches, most notably Prosper Obidi, Josh Scoynes and Danielle Adora. The Sunday afternoon saw smiles all round as pupils received their certificates of achievement. Miss Watkins was caught shedding a tear or two at how proud she was of her old year group and hopes firmly that those who found a natural talent, Cindy Nwanonobi, or even just caught the outdoor bug, Akim Abubakar, continue to explore this moving forward.

A Trip Around the World at OLHS

On Friday 30th September, Our Lady’s celebrated Languages Day. This was an opportunity for the entire community to celebrate the broad and diverse linguistic and cultural diversity that makes Our Lady’s such a unique and dynamic place to learn and work. Miss Watkins started off proceedings, delivering assemblies to all year groups on the importance of language learning. She shocked pupils with worldwide statistics relating to languages but it was the realisation that 60% of the Our Lady’s community have an awareness of another language, with 70 languages present amongst us, that really won over the hearts and minds of pupils.

On the Friday itself, pupils had the opportunity to take part in one of two competitions. The first was a languages themed bake off competition, which saw beautiful cakes adorned with language, flags and even a very impressive attempt at an Eiffel Tower! Miss Roe and Mr Menga were blown away and crowned Lily Agnew and Celestyn Mbagwu joint winners for their efforts. During the afternoon, Miss Watkins was accompanied by pupils from around the school who were given a table in the hall and were challenged with representing their culture, country, language or religion of choice in a way that felt appropriate to them. In total 18 different stalls were entered with pupils choosing to represent; Poland, Islam, Hong Kong, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Congo, Spain, France, Sweden, Pakistan, Portugal, India, Italy, Germany, Ghana, Jamaica, Philippines, Equitorial Guinea and Ukraine. Staff and pupils had the opportunity to move around

the stalls and learn about the different places on display from the experts themselves and were delighted with the sights, smells, tastes and information that was presented. Whilst all pupils did a wonderful job, judges crowned Nigeria the winning team with Poland in a close second and the Philippines and India sharing third place. A wonderful day had by all!