This week I have spent quite a bit of time out of college to report on progress and to celebrate our outstanding work to the trust’s executive team and governors. As part of our accountability framework and governance strategy, each term, key staff members including curriculum leads, finance teams and HR colleagues report to myself to update me on how we are getting on! This is a brilliant time to truly celebrate and to hear about what we do every day at Medtia! Mr Pidlyskyj and I then attend a meeting with the trust’s executive team and governors to report on our progress. Just some of the exciting things going on this term that we celebrated include-

• Outstanding Teaching! During our latest round of lesson observations, all of our pathway leads led an outstanding lesson with our students!
• Enterprise as a focus! We are developing more opportunities for our students to participate in enterprise activities, including most recently our Digital Advantage week!
• More partnerships with employers! We have new placements at David Lloyd Cheadle, Activ8 now access the David Lloyd facilities weekly for sports sessions and Lumenus have formed a new partnership with The Royal Exchange Theatre which will include performances, workshops and work experience opportunities!

These are just a handful of the many brilliant things going on already this year!

Now on to some updates from our staff and students…

It has been a very eventful half term in the English department. We have had a wide array of topics being covered from Skellig to Crime and Punishment; all the while expanding and developing our young people’s horizons.

In our KS5FS3+4 groups we have begun a reading and writing project based on the fantastic novel by David Almond, Skellig. The students have been particularly engaged in the beautiful and haunting novel. They have all been working hard to develop their Reciprocal Reading skills enhancing their own abilities to question, summarise and contextualize the narrative in order to utilise these skills when sitting their Entry Level Functional Skills exams later this year.

In KS5FS2 English we have been continuing to explore William Golding’s masterpiece Lord of the Flies. We have used the text to not only develop comprehension ability but to begin to analyse key motifs and rhetorical devices in texts. We have also used the text as a basis to cover key topical debates to enhance our Speaking and Listening skills.

The students have been working hard to comprehend the novel and to interpret key descriptive parts of the task with many activities, a key one being the modelling activity where students worked hard to create their own microcosm of the island using the descriptive writing as their stimulus. There were some excellent models. It was a very successful task and the students worked hard at creating their replicas of the island.

We have also worked on improving our non-fiction writing this term, building our own version of the “The Huts on the Beach” with a myriad of items that could be found on the island and writing instructions on how we built them.

We even had a tree house shelter!

The gatherers gathering their materials..

..and one defending his hut from hunters!

The students have worked in teams as Hunters and Gatherers to run their own campaigns to be elected to run the island. We set up our own mock parliament and ran an election. It was a fair fight and there were great persuasive techniques used across the board, flyers, banners and placards. In the end our Gatherers won the election. They all ran great campaigns.

In our KS5GCSE group we have continued working on our skills to answer English Language Paper 2 using Crime and Punishment as our focus. The students have been working hard at comparing writers’ viewpoints using rhetorical devices to analyse texts from the 19th and 21st century to explore and evaluate similarities and differences in a plethora of contexts, audiences and purpose. The students have been working tirelessly and have been making extraordinary progress and we are all so proud of them.

We have also had an extra development in English here at Medtia with the amazing addition of our fantastic library which has continued to grow. The students and Mrs. Hartley have been working very hard at filling and organising the library and the students have been extremely keen to utilise the fantastic resources whilst developing their reading skills.

We have had an outstanding term in English and are as proud as ever of all the staff and students involved. We look forward to another fantastic term working to improve the students’ abilities and preparing them for amazing futures.

Our Lumenus pathway students have been working hard too..

This week in Lumenus we have had another busy week. On Wednesday we were joined by Key Stage 4 Lumenus at Oldham Theatre Workshop. In the morning some of the group joined Chrysalis, an adult theatre group. They participated in lots of drama games and enjoyed meeting members of the group.

 

In the afternoon Lumenus were rehearsing for the Secondary Schools Partnership, a snippet of which will be showcased in the Christmas Show. The piece is based on ‘Times are Changing’ and it is coming together nicely.

On Thursday it is pathway day for Key Stage 5 and in the morning Ananya led a yoga session. Ananya did really well leading it and everyone felt very relaxed and at peace by the end of it! 

We continued with physical theatre and started to look at the evolution of man and created some freeze frames and explored the topic.

We have some really exciting projects coming up so keep an eye out!

Congratulations to our Pre Intern Jade who was awarded ‘Worker of the Week’ for all her hard work at The Atrium..

Spring Brook Lower School are supporting the Bone Cancer Research Trust’s Stamp Appeal and collecting used stamps at school (click here for more details about the campaign). Please could you send in any stamps you receive and we will make sure they are sent on to the charity. Thank you.

Finally just a reminder that we have our Parents’ Evening on Tuesday evening from 4pm to 6pm. Please arrive before 5.30pm. We look forward to seeing you then!

Daniel
Head of Key Stage 5 Pathways

Click here for this week’s news from Graham

You can view our previous blog entries here

News from the Learning Centre and New Bridge School can be found here