Friday Reflections

Welcome everyone back to learning via home schooling. Hopefully everyone has had a great few weeks over the summer break. We wish all our homeschoolers joining college this week - good luck and well done for getting a place. It has been quite a difficult time waiting for interviews and letters of acceptance. Those of you who leave us deserve you place in college, please don't ever forget that.

One of our favourite saying is “Life Happens” and life certainly did happen for us last 5 months with lock down. Most of you took an advantage of it and got on with your learning and moved right a head and finished the year on time or a little ahead of time. There were only 3 of you who fell of the learning wagon and struggled to finish the assigned work.

September is the New (school) Year, therefore let us use it as a fresh start and re-dedicate our efforts to our learning and gaining those all-important life skills of Maths and English and a good all-round general knowledge of the world.

The garden club carried on over the summer and we learnt a lot about solitary bees. The Bumblebee Conservation Trust sent us some great stuff about bees. I still have some goodies left over from the brilliant package they sent. Including a packet of seeds to plant over 50 square meters for the pollinators. So, speak up and you can have what is left.

Although we were not able to visit them in August due to the heat wave and ‘the world and his wife’ going to the beach and blocking the access road to the trusts education centre - we are on track to visit first thing next year. We are booked on their first event. So, if you thought you might like to have gone but didn’t book in time - now is the time to get on the list.

So, what’s new for this year? Well, we are launching the Orchard Training Cookery Club this month at the suggestion of one of Horsell learners. This week, Y6, Y7 and Y8 have all been busy baking Elizabethan recipes. The Y6 Queens of Puddings were amazing when they first come out of the oven, all fluffy with meringue on top. They weren’t that bad when I got to try them cold the following day – thanks for saving me one. The Elizabethan Plum Tart was out of this world. Again I was given a slice. We clearly have some skilled pastry makers. The jumbles in Y8 were interesting to make and although we didn’t necessarily appreciate the Elizabethan’s spice palate, you are willing to make them again for the shapes with a more modern selection of flavourings.

We are working on the study buddy groups this week, please don't worry if you are not in one just yet we have a lot of new people joining us.

we have applied for some funding from Sports England. If we are successful, we will be employing a Personal Trainer for 10 weeks of our P.E. lessons. This will free to all of our learners to join in especially the girls.

Check out the calendar for you activities over the course of the week.