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Performing Arts:- Page 24
EXTRA-CURRICULAR DRAMA
Students in KS3 worked really hard towards the KS3 Performing Arts Evening preparing drama, dance and musical numbers which took place on Wednesday 15th December on North Site in the main hall. The evening was truly spectacular and a testament to all the hard work the students put in. Congratulations to each and every one of you. Please see photos on the next page.
This term students in KS4 and 5 have auditioned for Antigone and we have gathered together a very strong cast. Rehearsals have begun for the performances in March and we are looking forward to seeing our students on stage again in a school show.
We are very much looking forward to celebrating and finally being able to share the achievements and Cherwell School talents of our students in Performing Arts. Presents
Antigone
By Mrs WighamMarch 2022 Head of Drama
Academic Enrichment @CherwellEnrich
Contact: Miss Richer (cricher@cherwellschool.org)
All students in our sixth form have the opportunity to participate in our optional Beyond Cherwell enrichment programme and award. Beyond Cherwell is designed to give students the space and support to connect with other students in different subjects, to explore their own developing interests and to consider options beyond school - whether university, apprenticeships, travel or the workplace. Students receive a weekly bulletin of opportunities and activities within school, in Oxford and through virtual links and a themed weekly interdisciplinary challenge that goes beyond the curriculum. There are opportunities for individual and small group mentoring for independent projects and academic competitions, the chance to publish academic writing and ideas in the student-led Cherwell Journal, personalised guidance for work experience, careers and university or college applications, volunteering opportunities, pastoral support and help with study skills.
This term, the programme has included: Tuesday after-school seminars with a range of guest speakers:
20 Years On: 9/11 Attacks, Global Security and International Relations with Dr Edward
Howell (University of Oxford) Dante: Reimagining Heaven and Hell with Professor Nick Haveley (University of York From Eye To Brain: How We See (Or Don’t) with Professor Holly Bridge (University of
Oxford) Medical Ethics: Euthanasia and End Of Life Care with Professor Dominic Wilkinson (University of Oxford) Marginalised pasts: Jews and Muslims in the History of Europe with Professor Abigail Green (University of Oxford) Practical Ethics and Responsibility with Dr Ben Davies and Liz Sanders (University of
Oxford’s Uehiro Centre) Why is North at the Top of the World Map? with Professor Jerry Brotton (author and broad caster, Queen Mary, University of London) Thinking About University and Student Finance with Precious Ejimonyeabala, University of
Bristol Tokyo: Art and Photography with Clare Cory (Ashmolean Museum) The Price of Life with Dr Padraig Dixon (University of Oxford) Sleep with Dr Manuel Spitschan (University of Oxford)
Art by Ava Rourke Art by Jaina John, Dec 2021
Beyond Cherwell students designed cards to thank speakers who have delivered lectures during term 1 & 2
Academic Enrichment @CherwellEnrich
Contact: Miss Richer (cricher@cherwellschool.org)
Project work, such as the ‘fashion and sustainability’ challenge with Low Carbon Oxford North and Oxfam, working with students from Oxford High School and St Clare’s to create new fashion from old clothes before modelling them in a special photoshoot at the Natural History Museum and sharing them with Oxfam as part of their anti-fast fashion drive.
Mentoring with University of Oxford researchers, such as the tutorials and ‘critical friend’ mentoring around practical ethics.
Peer mentor volunteering through our informal ‘ask a student’ scheme and through our extended team of 20 Year 13 peer mentors.
Early UCAS application support
A group of 60 Year 13s putting in early applications to university through UCAS (for Oxford, Cambridge, medicine, veterinary medicine and dentistry) have been working together on Fridays after school to help them think creatively, flexibly and independently about their chosen subject areas. The programme started with advice on choosing courses over the summer before guiding through forming personal statements, making connections between subjects, approaching unfamiliar subject material, preparing for admissions tests and interviews and getting a first exposure to universitylevel teaching. We have drawn extensively on the generous support of our school community, bringing in twenty former students to act as mentors and over thirty University of Oxford academics to provide small-group tutorials and subject-specific seminars (and reading suggestions and tasks around these) and to give every student a subject-specific mock interview! Regardless of the outcome of their applications, we hope that the process has been an enriching one. We certainly know that they will go on to brilliant things in the future and we look forward to bringing them back as alumni guests in future years, too!
To find out more about the Beyond Cherwell programme and to receive the weekly bulletin as a parent or supporter, please contact Miss Richer
(cricher@cherwellschool.org).
Academic Enrichment @CherwellEnrich
Contact: Miss Richer
European Youth Event
In July 2021, we gained accreditation as one of the first UK schools to be awarded status as a European Parliament Ambassador School. The EPAS scheme is designed to promote international collaboration, political advocacy and active citizenship, empowering young people to take a proactive stance in discussing and shaping their future beyond local boundaries. Being an EPAS school gives us the opportunity to connect with political, business and academic leaders across the continent as well as to make links with other students and schools abroad.
We received a grant to take a group of students to the biennial ‘European Youth Event’ in Strasbourg - a huge conference of thousands of young people from across Europe, this year on the theme of ‘the future of Europe’. Whilst Covid travel restrictions prevented us from going in person, 30 students in Year 12 and 13 came into school on Saturday in October to join the conference virtually. We recreated the European Parliament in the sixth form centre, with our very own hemicycle attempt, and took part in a range of activities, including:
Live virtual talks on themes of the environment, social mobility, political narratives and the media. A ‘balloon debate’ on the UN’s sustainability goals A school audit on an issue important to us Work in preparation for COP26 Group project work on chosen specialist areas, including COP26 and sustainability, trade and borders, democratic structures and human rights, and science and Covid responses.
Students shared their ideas with each other in school before voting on the most pressing issues to feed back to the ‘European Youth Event’ team in Strasbourg.
Academic Enrichment @CherwellEnrich
Contact: Miss Richer (cricher@cherwellschool.org)
EPAS Ambassador Work
We were asked to lead a training session for schools across the UK to launch the European Parliament’s 2021/22 EPAS cycle. Rowan, Ava and Rayan (Year 12) were fantastic ambassadors for the school and for the EPAS programme, sharing their experiences of being involved in EPAS through their debates, their Key Stage 3 ‘takeover’ lessons, their Cherwell Journal articles and the various visiting speaker talks and Q&A sessions.
Euroscola Conference
We won a prestigious competition for some of our EPAS Junior Ambassadors to represent the UK as the national delegation at a Euroscola Conference, a virtual meeting of the 27 partner countries (and selected non-EU partners!). We began with an early morning European continental breakfast buffet before meeting virtually with the President of the European Parliament (David Sassoli), interviewing one of its Vice Presidents and advocating to the Head of the Subcommittee on Human Rights (Mychelle Rieu) in an ‘innovation lab’. We were delighted that - in addition to our pre-recorded question - Noah (Year 12) was one of three students across the continent to ask a live question (even if his question was met with a rather politician ‘acknowledge but avoid’ answer…). Students finished the event with a wide-ranging discussion with Mr Hilton (Deputy Headteacher), feeding back their ideas to the school’s leadership and thinking about ways to take forward in school some of their priorities.
Beyond Cherwell Goes International Finland 2022
Academic Enrichment @CherwellEnrich
Contact: Miss Richer (cricher@cherwellschool.org)
We are excited to announce that we have won a government Turing Scheme grant to provide a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity for a free fully-funded international trip to Finland and Estonia for 32 Year 12 students for two weeks in April 2022. The trip is entirely free: all costs, including food, activities, transport and accommodation, are covered by our Turing Scheme grant.
This is a unique opportunity for educational and adventure travel, to take students beyond Cherwell and to forge new international connections. Our trip is themed around ideas of sustainability and collective responsibility, working in partnership with a Finnish school to consider innovative approaches to the environment and our use of its resources. We’ll move from cutting-edge developments of Helsinki to the remote geographical challenges of Lapland and the Arctic Circle. We’ll learn the complex cultural
and political history of the region through working with the European Parliament in Helsinki and visiting Tallinn in Estonia. Our time will be spent on a mixture of group project work, activities, educational trips, adventure trips (aurorae-hunting in the forests of the Arctic Circle), school-based observation and joint community projects with Finnish and Estonian students. Students will continue their work back in school, finding ways to share their new experiences and give back to our community.
We look forward to sharing updates on our preparatory programme as our students begin to get ready for the trip next term. To follow along and see our progress, keep an eye on our Twitter feed - @CherwellEnrich.
Cherwell Journal
Academic Enrichment @CherwellEnrich
Contact: Miss Richer (cricher@cherwellschool.org)
The Cherwell Journal continues in full force, with students submitting their research, writing and illustrations on a range of non-fiction topics that take them beyond their school curriculum. Articles this term have included:
Spyware, objects and the truth behind Bond.
A green manifesto for Cherwell
Persephone and the pomegranate
The ethics of vaccine passports
How to lose yourself in a good book
Are our rivers safe to swim in?
A guide to coming of age films
COP26 and green capitalism
Jeanne Demessieux’s chorale preludes
Kintsugi and valuing the broken
Trade, borders and the EU
Key Stage 3 Journal Club
Students can submit writing at any time but some of our Key Stage 3 contributors gather on Wednesday lunchtimes to work together on their ideas, working with the mentorship of our sixth form editorial team to collaborate and share their enthusiasm.
Some of our students have also enjoyed one-to-one mentoring with researchers from the University of Oxford’s Uehiro centre and practical ethics team. After an initial virtual small group tutorial, students drafted articles and submitted them for feedback, meeting again individually with their research to act as a ‘critical friend’ before publishing their final piece - with some then invited to guest publish on the University’s own blog. If students have ideas for a project, a niche interest they’d like to explore or an area in school they’d like to think more deeply about, we’d love to guide them and help shape an article. To find out more, contact Miss Richer (cricher@cherwellschool.org).
In 2021, we published a total of 162 articles from 146 student contributors: can we match this total in 2022?!
To read the Cherwell Journal:
Years 12 and 13: https://thesixthformreview.wordpress.com/ Years 10 and 11: https://thekeystage4review.wordpress.com/ Years 7, 8 and 9: https://thekeystage3review.wordpress.com/
Academic Enrichment @CherwellEnrich
Contact: Miss Richer (cricher@cherwellschool.org)
As part of our pastoral enrichment programme, we took a group of Year 10 students and a group of Year 12 students on a residential trip to Wytham Woods. Students spent 24 hours in the woods including a night in a tent - getting to know each other, pushing their comfort zones and discovering new settings. They took part in a range of activities, including:
Nature walks with an ecologist
Photography and sketching session Badger watching Bat detection Campfire building Cooking (including an excellent BBQ and apple crumble) Marshmallow toasting Workshops on the research including the world-famous tit studies Whittling and bushcraft skills
The students showed some impressive resilience to rain, cold and wind and they were a real testament to themselves and to the school. Badger watching
Kim Polgreen tweeted
It was a privilege to hang out with @CherwellEnrich’s wonderful students @WythamWoods. The badgers came to clear up after you’d had gone to bed
Academic Enrichment @CherwellEnrich
Contact: Miss Richer (cricher@cherwellschool.org)
We were delighted to collaborate with the University of Oxford’s Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) for their ‘Dante Festival’ - a celebration of 700 years since Dante’s Inferno. We invited students to creatively ‘reimagine hell’ for the modern age and we were delighted that 35 students took up this challenge! They met with Professor Gervase Rosser, who gave a talk in school about ‘Dante and the Age of Celebrity’ and shared some of the highlights of the exhibition he has curated, and with Professor Nick Haveley, who looked at how Dante has inspired visual culture to the modern day. Students then produced their own work in response - with short stories, poems, animations, illustrations, canvases and even a 2m sculpture installation of nine descending circles of hell! They exhibited at a special ‘After Hours’ event at the Ashmolean Museum, taking over Gallery 31 and sharing their pieces with members of the public over three hours (alongside a world exclusive performance of Ai-da, a robot poet..!).
Congratulations to all the students who took part; we’re sure it’ll be the first of many successful exhibits in the future!
Academic Enrichment @CherwellEnrich
Contact: Miss Richer (cricher@cherwellschool.org)
We were delighted to receive so many fantastic submissions for our autumn term school competition: ‘write on rivers’. Students were challenged to respond to the theme of ‘rivers’ in either a creative or non -fiction category and we received nearly 50 entries taking a huge range of approaches, from poems, short stories, art work and commentaries, annotated maps, scientific reports, local histories and personal reflections.
The judging panel was made up of teachers from different subject areas across the school: Miss Richer, Ms Moyse, Mrs Garton, Mrs Parish, Mrs Fogden, Ms Alexander, Mr Hibbert, Mr Moss and Mr Littlewood. We were delighted to read students’ work and we had lots of animated discussions debating our favourites. It was very hard to reach an overall decision!
The winners are:
The panel also wanted to give special commendations to three of their favourite entries that didn’t quite make the winners’ list:
Year 7 Year 8
Creative Sissi Feng Olive Scott
Non-Fiction Gabriel Richmond Jane Westenskow
Year 9 Sharin Poongaran Year 10 Iris Coleman
Year 11 Year 12 Sophie Meredith
Kenzy Aly Jaina John Rowan Hector-Turnbull Year 13 Rand Al Muqham Emily Meredith
Year 7: Manupa Ekanayake (Non-fiction) Year 10: Saskia Weiss (Creative) Year 12: Aman Kumar (Non-fiction)
We look forward to rewarding all contributors in our end of term celebration assemblies!
The ‘write on rivers’ competition is also our first River Learning Trust collaborative competition and we are delighted to nominate our winners to go up alongside the other seven secondary schools across our academy network, with a celebration event with the University of Oxford to follow.
Keep an eye on our Twitter account to find out the outcomes: @CherwellEnrich.
Miss C Richer
Year 7: Manupa Ekanayake
