Somerset Day

Kung Hei Fat Choi!

The Senior School celebrated the Chinese Year of the Tiger with a range of activities, including a special Cathedral assembly, a concert and Chinese decorative art projects. Cantonese-speaking A level Chinese pupils celebrated the New Year by making their own Chinese dumplings, fish balls and barbecued pork noodles with their teacher, Ms Echo Yu. Great fun and laughter was had by all. The Wells Chinese New Year feast is becoming a bit of a tradition!

The children in Pre-Prep and the Junior School also enjoyed celebrating the Chinese New Year in a range of multi-sensory ways, by making tiger lanterns, creating dragons, playing with chopsticks, tasting new flavours and making cakes. A traditional Chinese lion came to visit the Nursery and Pre-Prep and the children enjoyed their own dragon dance, singing a song they have learned in Music.

Ms Desmarchelier, Director of Languages in the Senior School, said: “We are so lucky, as a community, to be able to experience other cultures, as it deepens our understanding of the world. We wish all our Chinese pupils, far from their families at this important time of the year, a prosperous Year of the Tiger!”

Somerset Day Celebrations

Across the School, we celebrated Somerset Day in May. We were proud to promote the official day of our beautiful home county and had a wonderful time celebrating our heritage with bunting, craft projects and Somerset-inspired food.

The School community got involved in a number of ways, with our fabulous catering team cooking up a delicious lunch for the School community, featuring local pork, Somerset cheddar quiche, classic ploughman’s lunch and traditional Somerset apple cake. The caretaking team also put up flags and bunting across the site and our Pre-Prep children designed flags and bunting of their own. Inspired by their lunch, the children baked their own Somerset apple cake and created recipes inspired by local Somerset produce.

Pictured are Kay, Chris, Sue and Polly, but the Team also includes technical staff, Isaac, Stan and Tom and Bill, Creative Programmer.

Meet the Enterprises Team!

The Enterprises Team is kept very busy all year round promoting the School’s wonderful facilities with a focus on generating further income for the School.

The team organises and helps to support the holiday music schools which cover wind, brass and percussion, jazz, strings, vocal, and composing for media and piano. Please see the back page for further details! Our beautifully-kept grounds and charming historic buildings, as well as the wide variety of facilities on offer, attract many other summer school providers who book our boarding houses and facilities for their own courses to use. Sometimes in summer, the School can seem just as full of children as it is during term time!

Cedars Hall has been a fabulous addition to the School's facilities. The team is responsible for running most concerts and events in Cedars Hall as well as providing support, ensuring that everything runs as smoothly as possible. The Hall offers professional-level recording and filming facilities, with several established recording artists who come back time and again.

To support families in Wells and the surrounding area, the team has recently brought in an outside provider, Activate, to run holiday camps during all the School holidays (apart from Christmas). The team also opens the swimming pool during the summer holidays for lessons and family swims.

EDF Energy Workshop

Year 9 were fortunate to be given a talk from Clair, who works for EDF. She discussed the different energies used to create electricity and the negative and positive effects. She also talked about what energy supplies are used for and why. For example, we learnt that solar energy was very efficient, although less practical during the winter months.

Later on, we learnt about wind turbines and how the quicker they travel the more electricity they produce. This led to us doing a practical; we had to create miniature wind turbines from different materials and then adjust them, to allow them to produce the most electricity. The winning amount was 4.03 volts. We made it quicker, by adjusting the direction the blades were spinning, adding larger wheels and smaller wheels (to reduce the friction) and changing the shape of the blades.

- Rosie Wells, Year 9