St Gregory the Great Catholic School
Newsletter
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Volume 6 Issue Twenty three 26th April 2013
MISSION STATEMENT: “We walk in God’s ways where together we live, love, learn and celebrate”
PRAYER
Good Shepherd,
Teach us to follow you
to care for all that are close to us,
to protect those who are threatened,
to welcome those who are rejected,
to forgive those who are burdened by guilt,
to heal those who are broken and sick,
to share with those who have little or nothing,
to take the time to really know one another
and love as you have loved us.
Amen.
CONTINUED SUCCESS
Congratulations to Zishan Choudhry who has been offered a place at St George's to study Medicine. Zishan has agreed to come back and help our students next year who would like to apply for Medicine.
EAL DEPARTMENT
In the week before Easter and also last week, the EAL Department hosted two groups of trainee teachers from the Department of Education at Oxford University. They spent a morning learning about the provision at St Gregory the Great for students whose first language is not English. Altogether, 46 trainee teachers were involved, 19 from Geography and 27 from Modern Foreign Languages, as well as many of our own teachers and our very welcoming EAL student guides. In May, we will be hosting a further group of 14 Religious Education interns from Oxford University’s Education Department. A huge thank-you to all!
MYSTERY DONATION – THANK YOU FROM MISS BROOKS
Just a note to say a big thank you for the kind donation that arrived to us in the library this afternoon. I would love to send you a thank you note but...I cannotdecipher your signature! (do get in touch)The money will be spent on a lovely book and a few funmagazines!
On another note the library now has a twitter presence, do follow us @stgregslibrary to keep up to date on library lifeand teen-fiction happenings in general!
‘LIGHTING UP LITERACY’ LEADER BOARD.
Thank you to every tutor group who emailed their brilliant entries for this week’s Caption Challenge – an image of Pope Francis’ skullcap being blown off by a gust of wind. Some of our favourites were: D12 ‘Hats off to the new Pope!!!’ F7 ‘Oh God, my bald spot is showing!’ D7 ‘UFO scares the pope’ B5 ‘Quick, getto the zucchetto’ (very well researched) and Dr Caseby’s ‘Pope trials new taco delivery service.’
Our Literacy Champions’ decision is of course final, with the top three entries being:
3rd Place – F4 ‘Hats off for the Pope.’
2nd Place – C13 ‘Whoops! The Holy Spirit is at it again!’
1st Place - C14 ‘Pope is winner with a hat trick.’
Don’t forget to look out for our next challenge commencing again on Monday and ensure your tutor group emails their winning entry to: for a chance to appear on the Literacy leader board!
THE ‘GREGORY’ – A NEW REWARD INITIATIVE
The ‘Gregory’ is a token given by members of staff to students who have been observed behaving in a way that is helpful, charitable and friendly or, in fact, any way that is worth rewarding instantly.
Students can use ‘Gregorys’ to decide how they would like £1000 - given by the PSA - to be spent (for the benefit of all students).
There are three options to choose from:
a) sports equipment/board games for break times
b) laptops for the library
c) speaker system for the rotunda area
Gregorys will be counted at the end of the Summer term and the £1000 will be spent on the option with the greatest number of Gregorys.
HEARD ON THE GRAPEVINE:
One of our more enterprising students is getting £1 from his parents for each Gregory he gets - he has told them the Gregorys are for good behaviour. What he didn’t tell them is that he is buying them from one of his friends for less than £1 !!!
ROWING
Ava Dale, Year 9, is representing the Thames Upper Region in the Inter Regional Rowing Regatta at The National Water Sports Centre, Nottingham on Saturday. In this event she will be racing scullers from the whole of England.
ATTENDANCE LEAGUE
It’s all change in the first week of the new term with C6 and C11 taking joint first on 100%! (Remember January?) Together with a top ten placing for C7, this puts Carmel into an early lead in the House competition, with the Champions from last term trailing in fourth place. Early days yet, though!
Results from last week15/4/13 – 19/4/13
Place / Group / % / Pts
1st = / C6 / 100 / 10
1st = / C11 / 100 / 10
3rd / D2 / 99.0 / 8
4th / B12 / 98.8 / 7
5th / F9 / 98.3 / 6
6th / D5 / 97.9 / 5
7th / B13 / 97.8 / 4
8th / C7 / 97.6 / 3
9th / F3 / 97.2 / 2
10th / D13 / 97.1 / 1
ACHIEVEMENT POINTS FOR LAST WEEK WERE:
Francis 349, Dominic 313, Carmel 296, Benedict 274
LANGUAGE OF THE WEEK
Guten Tag! Well done if you guessed that last week’s language of the week was German and thank you to Mrs Cadle for her contribution! With an estimated 100 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and it is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union. With Oxfordshire being the home of the BMW-Mini Plant, Kraft Foods, Miele and Siemens, German is a very important language for our area. And you know of course what a "Hamburger" (from Hamburg) or a “Frankfurter” (from Frankfurt) is but what would you say if you were offered a "Berliner"? The right answer would be; "Vielen Dank. Ja, bitte" (Thank you. Yes, please) – provided you like doughnuts!
Can you guess what this week’s Language of the Week is?
Здраво!Сунце сија и ја волим школу јер видим све своје пријатеље. Моји омиљени предмети су спорт и математике јер су занимљиве и забавне. Мислим да је енглески је мало досадно. Здраво!
Answer in next week's newsletter. If you would like a language you speak to be a future Language of the Week, then please contact Ms Rappak in MFL.
ROCK CHALLENGE 2013 – A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO MRS WILEMAN
Youths are rioting on Britain’s streets
Stolen trainers on their feet
Banding together in organised gangs
Violent looters taking all they can
Decent people scared to venture out
A broken society of that there’s no doubt
But these youngsters and adults don’t loot for need
They are consumed by selfish greed.
ANGER, FIRE, FEAR
On Tuesday we made our now annual trip to Portsmouth to perform our Rock Challenge piece, Anger, Fire, Fear. This theme was chosen by the students and was based on the London Riots of 2011.
Every year our students do us proud and this year was no exception, under Miss Dawson’s guidance each character group had been responsible for preparing their own choreography and this resulted in an innovative, creative performance of technical excellence, entertaining whilst still highlighting the serious issues of our theme.
Rock challenge is not just about the dancers and a special mention to Misgana Bazezew Demissie who designed our lighting supported by Mcintosh Tapa on the spotlight and Rebekah Noonan who designed our video.
As usual the staff have also been a key part in the preparation and the day itself, many thanks to Mr Humphreys and Mr Johnson for their work on the set, Mrs Bunch for coming in and painting even when on maternity leave, Mr Nicholls for assisting with painting the set and his support on the day, Mr Wileman for driving the van to transport the set and Mrs Swanton for her support with costumes. Last but certainly not least Rock Challenge would not happen each year without the time and commitment put in by Miss Dawson, congratulations on a fantastic Soundtrack award, very well deserved.
Well done to the whole team, you are professional, talented and a pleasure to work with:
6th Form
Jessica Poudy, Tara Adenle, Austine Ehibhatiomhan, Kenneth Ndawula, Chanel Mullen, Stephanie Rockett, Clarice Julianda, Misgana Bazezew Demissie, Mcintosh Tapa
Year 11
Jade Saunders, Harry Pudwell
Year 10
Emily Doyle, Phoebe Quinn, Grace McDonagh, Aimee Randall, Ashleigh Patrick, Rebekah Noonan
Year 9
Jennifer Poudy, Roma Erdbeer, Ciara Hulbert, Rochelle Jack , Maria Gomes, Segen Michael,
Isaiah Samuels, Noel Har
Year 8
Hannah Woods, Peter Mburu
Year 7
Chloe Saunders, Sophie White, Carmen Powell, Enya Dale, Ricola Hutchinson
Elyse Thomas-Collaire
SPOT AWARDS FOR EQUPPED TO LEARN
Nyah Atkinson, Abu Bakr Banaras, Jack Betts, Joshua Bonney, Georgia Chambers, Saul Chand, Jv Dani, Moin Dogar, Fatima Farooq, Shante Fraser-Cornish, William Godfrey, Yasin Hussain, Fabiolla Ingabire, Rhianne Johnson, Patrick Keaney, Kristina Kelly, Priya Lal, Brenda Ngabire, Juan Nunes, Glejdis Palamani, Jack Pullen, Nimra Saqib, Ibraheem Shan, Danny Silva, George Spencer, Riversan Thapa, Alexander Thompson, Charlotte Trinder-Jones, Isaac Warrington, Quennel Williams
ENGINEERING EDUCATION SCHEME – A SIXTH FORM THANK YOU
From Hassan Khushi, James O’Callaghan, Olivia Lawler and Luke Simmonds
“We were assigned a project which involves engaging the public to help explain the science behind MRI and to show the impact of the research on MRI being carried out at the Gray Institute. We all enjoyed the project very much and we would like thank Mrs Nigriello and the DT Department, especially as they spent around 100 hours collectively working on the project with us. We could not have done it without them.”
Editors Note:
What these four super students have not told you is that on Wednesday they made a quality presentation to a Board of Judges competing against the top Grammar Schools and Eton.
We await the results but I’m convinced that all 4 will receive the top level Gold Crest Award. It really is a very powerful piece of advanced degree level Physics!
AND FINALLY
So this week the Humanities Department under the leadership of Mr Skerry has been under the microscope. It’s been a great success so far. No escape for the Head on this one. I was observed teaching my A/S Economics Group! I’m not going to tell you what grade I got let’s just say there’s always room for a little bit of improvement.
Best wishes
Mr J J Hussey
Executive Headteacher