Spring into Summer

With spring in the air, our Prep pupils have been enjoying educational forays to the hills and countryside to the south and west of London.

This term Prep School pupils from our 8s to our 11s have been out and about in the English countryside in Surrey and Berkshire to enrich their learning in geography, humanities and citizenship.  Head of Studies (Reception -10s/Year 6) and mathematics teacher Warren Rodricks is keen to point out the educational value of these outings when he says, 'trips provide first hand experiences that engage our pupils and encourage them to be excited and enthusiastic learners. They also let our pupils see learning in a real world context...it stops just being theory and they start to understand that what they are learning has an essential practicality to understanding and changing the world.'

8s Residential trip to Ufton Court

Our 8s pupils (Year 4) enjoyed their first school overnight residential trip at the beginning of March when they travelled to Ufton Court near Reading. 

 

To bring their learning in Humanities to life, children were transported back in time to Ancient Greece on the two-day trip, where they traded with one another at a market and acquired some key survival skills for living in the kind of house that everyday Ancient Greek citizens lived in - often made of mud or wood - and practised building wattle walls of woven sticks. They learnt how to strike sparks from a flint to make a fire, shoot pigeons (no animals were harmed!), grind corn and wheat to make flour, card, spin and weave wool. Other activities involved enacting the battle of Thermopylae, enjoying a Greek feast in honour of the god Dionysus and competing in a version of the ancient Olympic Games that included discus and javelin throwing, long jump and running races.

When asked about their favourite parts of the trip Barnaby pick out discus-throwing in the Olympic Games whilst Arya says, 'I enjoyed acting out the Minotaur before the banquet and then eating dinner, like the Greeks did, with my hands!'

Head of Year James Almond is really impressed with how well the children behaved and how grown up many of them were. "For some of the children, this was their first experience of staying away from home without their families and they have really grown in both resilience and independence as a result." 

10s Geography trip to Rushall Farm

Following this our whole 10s year group enjoyed a Geography Department trip to Rushall Farm where they were introduced to both the traditional and modern aspects of mixed farming and learnt about how organic beef and lamb production is accommodated alongside bean and cereal arable crops.

They visited the animals - cows and sheep amongst them - and saw machinery such as ploughs and seed drillers being used on the farm. They also discovered how the farm has diversified to pay its way in the modern age. Among the innovations that pupils visited on their tour were a campsite and traditional threshing barn which has now become an education centre, a venue for weddings, parties and barn dances! Some of the other highlights included learning about the importance of bees in general and their use in farming, feeding the chickens with seeds and looking at how they lay their eggs, as well as sitting on a trailer attached to the back of a tractor and being taken to different sites around the farm. 

"It was such a fun and muddy day," says Ariana in the 10s. "I really enjoyed feeding the chickens and testing the mud - we dug up three contrasting areas of land with a shovel and looked at how the mud was different in each."

10s Junior Citizenship trip to Holly Lodge

Our 10s also visited Holly Lodge in Richmond Park this month for a Junior Citizenship day run by Richmond Borough for all Year 6 students.

The aim of this trip is to help our 10s keep safe, to teach them how to deal with different types of dangers, as well as introduce them to their local police officers and firefighters and encourage socially responsible behaviour. They learnt top safety tips first hand from emergency service workers, including council officers and electricity company representatives. 

"We learnt all about road safety, what to do in an emergency, who to call and speak to and how to stay safe. My favourite part was investigating a staged car crash and working out from all the clues what exactly had happened," says Duke in the 10s. 

11s Geography trip to River Tillingbourne, Juniper Hall

The day that they spend on the banks of the River Tillingbourne each spring is an important educational coming of age for our 11s geographers, marking as it does their first real experience of proper research ‘in the field’.

After a briefing from experts at the Juniper Hall centre, our year 7s and all Harrodian’s Geography teachers embarked on a bus ride that took them to three different spots along the course of the river where they stopped off to measure and record changes in the Tillingbourne’s width, depth and velocity using equipment such as tape measures, metre ruler sticks, stop watches and corks as it flows down to its confluence with the River Wey.

They enjoyed working in small groups together and some of the highlights of the trip for them included getting in the river in their wellies, seeing an oxbow lake which had dried up and formed a meander scar, and collecting data using geographical equipment.

"My friend got his wellie boot stuck in the mud, and we had fun trying to get it out but I also really enjoyed the duck race," says Alex in the 11s. Meanwhile Layla explains how they measured the speed of the river when she says, 'we used stopwatches to time how long it took a cork to float from one end of the 3-metre distance to the other.'