World Book Day 2023
Once again at Kendrick School we decided to celebrate World Book Day for an entire week, rather than confining it to one day…after all, reading is such a wonderful thing to celebrate!
Once again at Kendrick School we decided to celebrate World Book Day for an entire week, rather than confining it to one day…after all, reading is such a wonderful thing to celebrate!
Towards the end of last year, the Kendrick House Captains launched the House Photography competition that was open to all year groups. Entries were invited to the themes of:
Photos were judged anonymously by Mrs Shaw, who has written a 'judge's comment' on the winning photos, indicating why she picked them.
On Wednesday 1st March, a group of students in Year 9, 10 and 11 joined students from other Reading schools at one of the events of the Write On Festival at The Abbey School. This festival celebrated a variety of different non-fiction writing genres, and the event we attended focussed on journalism, and it included a Q and A panel with local journalists, broadcasters and documentary makers as well as a number of smaller workshops. The students report on their experiences below.
On the 28th January, History students had the opportunity to travel to Newbury in order to visit The Doctors Show which is based on our final GCSE unit, ‘Health and the people’. The trip consisted of a very entertaining and historically accurate depiction of important historical figures who have contributed to medicine across time, and an extremely helpful exam technique workshop.
We are very proud to announce the winner of the National Non-Fiction November Writing Competition to be one of our Year 7 students – Roberta in 7WM!
National Non-Fiction November is the Federation of Children’s Book Groups’ annual celebration of all things factual. Born out of National Non-Fiction Day, the whole month of November now celebrates all those readers that have a passion for information and facts and attempts to bring non-fiction celebration in line with those of fiction.
On the 23rd of January, Year 11 geography students, wrapped in about 50 layers of clothing, embarked on their second field trip. This was to gather data to analyse in our GCSE paper which discusses Geography around the UK. We explored the small, rural village of Berinsfield, a quaint, nucleated, commuter settlement situated just 13.1km away from the urban hub of Oxford.
We left Kendrick just after registration, and hopped on coaches which took us to Berinsfield. Once at the village, our coach-driver took us on a whistle-stop tour (with our Geography teachers doing amazing voiceovers) of the village, circling the sites we would gather data from. We had a particularly interesting insight, Berinsfield being the area Mrs Dunlop grew up in- we were even able to see her primary school!
This year, a team of 6th Form students, comprising Airah, Aishwarya, Aislin, Esha, Fatimah, Katherine, Laiba, Navya, Nevedya, Priyal, Shreya, Shriyam and Tawhida, entered the Falcon 2 Challenge which is run by The Royal Aeronautical Society in partnership with Boeing, Middlesex University, and a disabled flying charity called Aerobility. The challenge required us to use our engineering skills to design, develop and eventually build a flight simulator that would be accessible for people with disabilities. The aim of the flight simulator is to give people of all abilities access to the world of flying and aviation.
On Wednesday the 25th January, Year 11 students were lucky enough to go to the Hexagon on a fantastic trip to see Poetry Live, organised by the English Department.
We left school after Period 1 and walked to the Hexagon with our teachers. At the Hexagon we were given booklets with the poems from the GCSE anthologies, centred around love, war, nature and relationships, and also some information about each poet we were going to hear from. We were very privileged, as these people included award-winning poets Daljit Nagra, Carol Ann Duffy, Imtiaz Dharker, Owen Sheers and John Agard as well as the current Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage!
Today, 27th January, is Holocaust Memorial Day.
Tomorrow’s Engineers Week, which takes place annually, is a week-long celebration of engineering designed to highlight to young people that engineering is a creative, problem-solving, exciting career that improves the world around us.
Last term two Kendrick students, Sarah and Dhitha took part in Tomorrow’s Engineers Week when it celebrated its 10th year with a new recorded broadcast - Future Minds Live. Around 50 young people were chosen to attend Future Minds Live, where they discussed their ideas for the future of engineering in four key sectors: Entertainment, Sport, Technology and Environment.
As the Christmas holidays fast approached, the school council team wanted to spread some festive joy throughout the school and also help our community through donations and shoeboxes.
Shoeboxes
Every year, we give children who are less fortunate a shoebox full of presents. This year, we chose to make shoeboxes for a charity called the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain (AUGB), who will give the shoeboxes to Ukrainian children aged 1–15 years old. Each form was delegated a gender and age to make a shoebox for, and the turnout was amazing! We had made more than 30 shoeboxes, ready to be delivered to the Ukrainian community, filled with useful gifts such as gloves and hats all the way to more fun presents like games and sweets!
In the first week of December, a group of students studying German from Years 11, 12 and 13 took part in the German Christmas Market trip, travelling over 700 miles in total.
Day 1 - Thursday 1st December
At 5 o’clock in the evening, we gathered in the school hall to get checked in and make sure we had a list of our groups. We said goodbye to our parents and got onto the coach, leaving at around 6pm. The coach was full of chatty students; all of us were so excited for what was to come! After three hours on the coach, we reached the Port of Dover, went through customs and got onto the ferry. Many of us were very tired, but still enjoyed the ferry ride! We arrived at the Port de Calais, and continued our 12-hour journey to Cologne.