This week, children in the Nursery and Reception classes visited the Sea Life Centre in Great Yarmouth. The children were given a guided tour so they could learn all about the fish and sea creatures in the centre. They were even allowed to touch a starfish! The trip was highly informative and thoroughly enjoyed by all the children. More pictures of this trip will be published on our Facebook page and in the website news section tomorrow.
The Saturday trip for the boarders this weekend was to Blickling Hall. They had the opportunity to explore the house and gardens, which were looking beautiful, and, since it was Mother’s Day on Sunday, they looked for gifts. They particularly liked the very cute Egyptian goslings, pictured below, that wandered past them in the grounds.
This week’s stars are as follows:
Charlie (Year 2) for neat and accurate handwriting and for tackling a difficult challenge in maths with great perseverance.
Lottie (Year 1) for moving up a level in reading and for excellent work in science.
Francesca (Reception) for working really hard with her reading and being very helpful in class.
Margot (Nursery) for being a very kind and helpful friend to a new child in Nursery.
Well done to all our stars!
On Friday, pupils raised money for Comic Relief by taking part in a series of fun challenges. To see more photos from the day, please click the following link https://www.hohs.co.uk/2019/03/16/comic-relief/
Winnie and Bubbles, our boarding house guinea pigs, need a host family for their Easter holidays. If you would like to look after them over Easter, please email Miss Kirkham, our Senior Housemistress, on boarding@hohs.co.uk.
Thank you.
On Thursday 7th February, some of our Year 10 and 11 pupils took part in the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust’s Mathematical Challenge. The girls were given 25 challenging problems to solve in 60 minutes. No calculators were allowed, only a pen, a pencil and some plain paper. Their papers have been sent off to Leeds University for marking and we look forward to receiving their results soon!
Here are 2 questions from the challenge for you to try.
a. -17 b. -11 c. 31 d. 37 e. 43
2. Two numbers, x and y, have a product which is equal to their sum. Express x in terms of y.
As part of the Health and Social Care course, Year 12 have to show how they can communicate effectively with younger pupils. This week, Year 12 have worked with some of our Year 7 girls. Hannah helped the girls to understand glacial erosion by building models of landforms out of Lego with them. Amelia supported their learning by showing Year 7 how to use Google Docs and Slides so they could all collaborate on the same slide presentation about glacial depositions. It was a really valuable experience for both Years 7 and 12 and Year 12 showed that they had wonderful communication skills in both individual and group work.
For their topic this half term, Year 2 have been learning all about ‘Incredible Inventions’. They have learnt about famous inventors such as Thomas Edison, The Wright Brothers and Alexander Graham Bell. They have also learnt how inventions have changed over time such as the development of music devices from the gramophone to the modern day iPod.
On Wednesday 6th February, Year 2 had an ‘inventions day’. The day began with a visit from a local inventor. April Nash works for Orchard Toys and she came to deliver a board games workshop. The children played some of the games she had invented before discussing what they liked about the games and what makes a good game. April then taught the children how to invent their own board games. The children had to think about a theme and include imaginative ideas such as going backwards or forwards spaces. The children produced some excellent game designs and will be writing instructions on how to play the game in their English lessons.
We are offering Years 7 – 13 an amazing opportunity to visit the Azores, Europe’s secret paradise, a group of small volcanic islands in the Atlantic off the coast of Portugal. They are so remote, mass tourism is non-existent and nature is unspoiled. It has a fantastic climate, about 23oC in October and fertile land, which means the islands are all self-sufficient and don’t need to import food from mainland Portugal in order to survive. We will have many opportunities to visit wonderful places including waterfalls, hot springs, tea and pineapple plantations, magnificent coastlines and calderas, as well taking a walking tour through caves made from lava tubes and the having the chance to eat a lunch cooked inside a volcano.
Our five-day tour to The Azores will depart on Friday 18th October and return on Tuesday 22nd October 2019. The price is £970. The deadline for reserving a place is Tuesday 5th February. If you would like your daughter to join us, please fill in the reply slip your daughter brought home or pop into Reception to pick up the full information pack.
As part of the Tuesday enrichment programme, sixth formers enjoyed the opportunity to form an impromptu steel pan band when steel-pan workshop providers ‘Spangle’ visited the school this week.
Steel pan drumming originated in Trinidad and Tobago, where old oil drums were cut down and their bases skilfully shaped by hammering to produce a range of notes. Since the Second World War the distinctive Caribbean sound produced by tin pan ensembles has become famous across the world. The instruments are ‘pans’ rather than drums because they are rigid rather than possessing a stretched membrane – but as our sixth formers discovered, playing technique is similar to drumming and they soon had an impressive set of rhythms going, guided carefully by the experts from Spangle.
After school, it was the staff’s turn and anybody passing the sixth form common room after four o’clock would have heard a not-half-bad version of Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman No Cry’ being tapped out, followed by a surprisingly melodic ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’.
It was a most instructive and enjoyable session for both groups, and we hope to welcome Spangle to further school events in the future.
Hethersett Old Hall School (HOHS) blog - an independent day and boarding school near Norwich, Norfolk. 