Bronze Awards
Following their successful DofE Bronze Expeditions, seven groups of students gave presentations to staff, students and parents about their expeditions. This was somewhat nerve wracking for many of them as presenting to an audience of 50 is not something many 14 year olds have to do!
Presentations ranged from Video Blogs through to PowerPoint presentations and booklets tracking their expeditions and their completion of their aims. The effort they had gone to, both during the expedition and in preparing for the event was really obvious and made for some very entertaining presentations. For some participants this was the final aspect of their DofE awards and so they will be getting their certificates early in the New Year!
UKMT Senior Challenge
Last month, our top A Level Mathematics students, plus our most talented Year 11 student took part in the UKMT Senior Mathematical Challenge. These star mathematicians faced 25 multiple choice questions covering a broad range of topics that severely tested their problem solving and reasoning skills.
This is a nationwide competition in which the top-performing participants receive a gold, silver or bronze certificate. Birchwood achieved one gold, three silver and 15 bronze certificates with Sam Sloan (Year 11) achieving the school’s highest score. With his gold-winning performance, Sam has qualified for the next round, which is an incredible achievement.
Well done to all those who participated and a huge congratulations to all of those who achieved a certificate. We are very proud!
Christmas Card Competition
Well done to all the students who took part in this year’s Christmas Card Competition. We had a phenomenal amount of high class entries this year. Congratulations go to Alexia Popa, Sydney Godden and Maddie Jennings for their winning entries, they each receive an Amazon voucher and the winning entry received 20 printed cards as well.
Christmas trees raise funds for PSFA
Dear Parents & Carers
The Birchwood PSFA has been invited to take part in an easy fundraising scheme for our school. For every Christmas tree bought through Squires of Stansted located at Sworders Fine Art Auctioneers CM24 8GE, they will give £5 to the PSFA. It’s that easy!!! You can either print off the attached flyer to take with you, or just mention Birchwood High School at the point of sale and they will set aside £5 for the school.
Also, don’t forget that tomorrow is the December deadline to purchase Birchwood Bonus Ball numbers. If you are looking for an easy stocking filler, why not buy someone a number in the Birchwood Bonus Ball this Christmas? If you buy a subscription for the remaining 9 months, it will be a one off payment of £18. You should make a direct transfer into the PSFA account (Sort code 20-25-19 and account number 23298728) and email birchwoodpsfa@gmail.com confirming your payment reference by Friday 14 December for your payment to be acknowledged and a number allocated to you by email on Saturday 15 December.
For full terms and conditions please see the school website. Please note that we are closing the subscription date earlier than normal this month.
With thanks for your continued support of the Birchwood PSFA.
The PSFA committee.
Stonewall Bronze Champions
Since December 2016, Birchwood High School has been a Stonewall School Champion. Stonewall is Britain’s leading LGBT+ charity, campaigning for the equality of lesbian, gay, bi and trans people. Belonging to the programme demonstrates our school’s commitment to tackling homophobic, biphobic and transphobic (HBT) bullying and celebrating difference and diversity in education. This has seen Birchwood staff and students start an equality group, present assemblies to raise awareness, build links with other schools in our community and work to ensure that acceptance without exception is a central part of school life. Last week was the culmination of a lot of hard work when Birchwood received the news that we had been granted the Stonewall School Champion Bronze award. As a nationally recognised award, we can all be very proud of what has been achieved to date, working and learning in a school where difference and diversity is respected and celebrated. The work now begins towards gaining Silver status in the new year.
Christmas Fayre
The PSFA would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who supported our first ever Christmas Fayre. Following on from our request for tombola prizes we were overwhelmed by the generosity of staff, students and parents. The PSFA team were helped on the day by some marvellous volunteers and we couldn’t have done it without their support! The event was really well attended, there was a lovely Christmas atmosphere and we’ve had some great feedback from stallholders. The event raised approximately £1200 and we will be asking staff and students for project ideas to put the funds towards.
Year 9 Boys win at District Cross Country
Well done to Caleb for winning the Year 9 Boys District Cross Country, which was held at Grange Paddocks recently.
Year 11 Globe Trip
Year 11 visited the Globe Theatre in London to enhance their knowledge of William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, which they are studying in class.
The day started off with a tour of the Globe, giving them key contextual knowledge to aid the students with forming top-level English responses. The students were then led off to various workshops. The aim was to enhance their knowledge of particular scenes, help them to form their own interpretations based on the themes and techniques used within the scene and also with the understanding of relationships between characters through role play and acting, such as Lord Capulet and Juliet.
Le Touquet 2018
Year 9, recently returned from their fantastic trip to Le Touquet. During the week the students immersed themselves in French culture, food and history. They had fun cooking traditional bread in wood fired ovens at an artisan Boulangerie and tried snails after visiting an organic snail farm. Other activities the students tried included Opalaventure high ropes course and exploring the caves at Arras where soldiers stored food and lived in during WWII. Students said they felt it had been the best trip they had been on.
Happy faces all round!
On Wednesday the Cafe held its annual Christmas Raffle and these were the lucky winners.