West Wilts Federation Sixth Form Leadership Conference

This event takes place every year for lucky year 12 students who are selected to go. This year's conference will be taking place at KYUEM, a private sixth form boarding school in Malaysia, which aims to prepare its students for university in Britain and America.

The trip is aimed at broadening the horizons of our young people, by giving them a taste of education in a far-flung location. They will be working with students from the college to research and make presentations on a global issue. This will encourage them to improve their research and presentation skills, as well as heightening their awareness of world problems.

I am delighted to be accompanying the trip this year, along with two students from Matravers and 14 others from four more West Wiltshire schools. We leave tomorrow, for a week of hard work and plenty of gun. Follow our antics here.

Extension Activity of the Week - 14

This week: Improving word power

I am minorly obsessed with word puzzles and Boggle is my favourite. I find that playing regularly helps to improve my vocabulary.

The two online Boggle simulators below can be used as an extension, as long as you don’t need to have instructions on the board for the rest of the class, or you don’t mind having pupils sitting at your computer.

I suggest loading up a board and giving pupils a dictionary, if you have one handy, so that they can check their words. If you freeze the board, there’s no need to worry about the time limit, either.

http://www.fun-with-words.com/boggle.html
http://www.wordtwist.org

Extension Activity of the Week 13

This week: Acrostics

A definite favourite with my year seven class, this simply involves inviting them to create a poem, in which the first letter of each line spells out a key word or phrase. The longer the phrase, the more challenging – and if you can include a word with an X in it, all the better! This activity encourages pupils to use words imaginatively and make connections between topics.

Dauntsey's Lecture Programme

Dauntsey's School have sent through details of their Mercers' Lectures programme, which runs through the year roughly once a month. They are already halfway through this year's lectures, but there are some exciting speakers coming up, including Germaine Greer talking about her experiences on February 5th.

There are details of the lectures here.

If you are interested in attending any of these lectures, please let me know, via a comment here or an email; we are not running any official trips yet but if there was enough interest I'm sure we could take a minibus down there.