After achieving 1st and 2nd place for our designs in the Falcon 2 Challenge last year, two teams from Kendrick School were invited to visit Coventry University for the launch of the next phase of the Falcon 2 programme. The Falcon 2 Challenge, sponsored by the Royal Aeronautical Society, is a national engineering competition which encompasses designing and building a flight simulator that is accessible and accommodates disabilities.
On Saturday 24th February, I had the opportunity to take part in a masterclass with Eleftheria Kotzia, a professional classical guitarist. Firstly, we talked about how we warm up before starting to play. We got into the right posture, and stretched our hands to improve blood flow and warm them up. Next, we discussed different ways to prepare before playing a piece, such as practising slurs, playing scales and arpeggios and practising technical work or studies. Then, each of us in the class got the chance to perform a piece for Eleftheria, and get her feedback on it.
I performed Kalamatianos, a traditional Greek dance which Eleftheria was familiar with, and she was able to give me lots of great advice on how to improve my playing by suggesting different fingerings for certain passages, as well as helping me change positions more smoothly.
On Monday 11th March, around 30 students from Kendrick and Reading School visited the Royal Berkshire Hospital (RBH) for a choral performance to lift spirits and raise some money for Royal Berkshire Hospital Charity.
As members of the Chamber Choir for the upcoming Air Ambulance Charity Concert, we had been preparing some repertoire and thought it would be a fun opportunity to get an extra performance before the big show!
On Thursday 14th March at lunchtime, the library had the pleasure of hosting the annual Holocaust Poetry Competition Presentation. This year, the theme of the competition was 'fragility of freedom', which clearly inspired many Kendrick poets. We had a wonderful range of poems submitted, which made the unenviable task of choosing the winners extremely difficult for our judges, Mr Dilley (Head of English) and Mrs Moseley (English & History teacher). Four students emerged as winners this year – Trisha and Inakshi from Year 12, Faith from Year 10 and a Year 8 student, Lara Maria.
International Women's Day The theme this year is Inspire Inclusion and at Kendrick we have chosen to focus on women in our lives who we know who have influenced us. Some amazing stories and photos have been shared by students and staff about their relatives - mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers- women that have had a positive and inspiring impact on their lives.
A display of these amazing women and of our staff supporting IWD is below.
On Monday 26th February, A-Level German, Spanish and French students went to Reading School to attend an event hosted by the Business Language Challenge on journalism and the influence of modern languages within the world of work. On arrival, we were welcomed with biscuits and then split into groups mixed with students from other schools, who studied the same language as us. After introducing ourselves to our team, everyone took part in a quiz in which we had to guess which news company belonged to which country.
On 6th and 7th March, Year 9 and Year 10, language students had the opportunity to watch a play during the school day in either German or French, depending on the language/s they are learning. The plays were performed by native speakers in that language, which was a great opportunity for us to hear the pronunciation in daily conversation and to visualise how certain vocabulary we had learnt would be applicable in day-to-day life. During the lesson before each of the plays, we went through some of the more specific vocabulary needed for us to understand them, so we learnt from the plays whilst being entertained!
Hello all! We are the Creative Writing Society, and we recently had a launch for our anthology, Winter Writings. We are a club with a wide age range, and an aim to develop and further improve our creative writing skills. That’s why we are excited to showcase our work in bound and printed form. Building on the knowledge from our first anthology (Time), we worked hard to match the high standard that our writers set last year. Originally, we planned to do a launch near the end of December, as it fitted well with the theme, but decided to move the date back, to give members time to really refine their stories.
As always, here at Kendrick we celebrated World Book Day ALL week in the library. We have been thoroughly enjoying our Agatha Christie puzzle and have made great progress over the week during break times.
Our Guess who? Competition also proved very popular with students trying to guess the staff members by their childhood photograph and a picture of their favourite book. With 20 to guess, some were harder than others!
During the final week of the spring term, the highly awaited annual event, House Drama, made its return. This year’s theme was centred around the ‘Candidate’ and all three houses delivered yet another set of truly remarkable and memorable performances. I am sure that these unique and inspiring presentations that our students produced made it challenging for our adjudicator, Reading Rep’s Senior Technician Hilda Harper to select a winner.
We are delighted for Akshaya in Year 10, who has qualified for the finals of the Berkshire Young Singer of the Year 2024 competition. Here is what she's said about what she shas to do next:
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On Monday 22nd January, the Year 11 Geography students left to conduct fieldwork about a rural area in a small village not far from Oxford called Berinsfield.
We took the coach there and when we arrived, we drove around the edge of the village. As soon as we got off the coach, we started conducting our primary research; we visited different sites on both the West and East side of Berinsfield so that we could compare them once we got back. It was interesting to find out that Berinsfield was only established in the late 1940s on a World War 2 airfield: it didn’t fit at all with what we picture a traditional village to look like!