While their new website is being developed, Spring Brook Academy will be sharing their news here. Last week Mrs Thorpe and Mrs Tootill let us know how Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 got the year off to a great start…

Thank you to all the staff for your blog entries, it’s lovely to see all the fantastic work that is going on across school and the wonderful learning opportunities our children are taking part in. Here is just a taste:

Miss Ebenezzer – Food Technology
All the pupils in Key Stage 3 have been looking at factors that affect food choice such as the season, cost, adverts, culture, religion, cooking skills, family, health and so on. This week we have looked at how different cultures have influenced food choice in Britain. SBA 2 have all made different dishes based on their food choices. SBA 1 completed cooking skills and sensory evaluation of the dish they made last week. Both SBA 2 and SBA3 made chicken curry to reflect the multicutural food choices in the UK – a popular choice! Our cooking skills focus this week was the ‘fork secure’ method and food presentation and we also used the ‘claw and bridge’ method too.

Mrs Needham – Maths
Key Stage 3 have had a great week consolidating their learning on division and some of the pupils even managed to divide decimals! Key Stage 4 have started the circle geometry topic and had a lesson on labelling the parts of a circle and finding the area and circumference of circles.

Mr Hopkins – PE
In PE the pupils have been competing to see how many calories they can burn off in one lesson. They have all completed an ‘Octathlon’ of 8 exercises with a target of burning off 150 calories. The exercises were: exercise bike, rowing machine, bench press, squats, arm curls, leg extensions, press ups and sit ups. With the competition fierce the eventual ‘calorie champion’ was Jack in Year 9 who managed an exceptional 332 calories!!!

Mrs Unwin – English
SBA1 and SBA2 have been reading the book ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime’ which they are really enjoying and which is furthering their understanding of autism and how if affects people. SBA1 have been looking at the language and trying to write in the style of the main charcater, Christopher Boone. Jack has learnt how to spell ‘forty’!! and Mr Daley continues to make progress too with his understanding of SPAG terminology. SBA3 are reading the novel ‘Stone Cold’ which is just getting interesting with the murder of 2 homeless people. The group are now working together around a table which is a huge step forward and in our SPAG lesson, Cameron and Leo were the stars of the show showing correct verb forms!! Connor I. has made huge progress with his spellings and is trying really hard to get a perfect score every week.

Key Stage 3 Nurture Group
Mark and Wayne made door signs during their design technology lesson in class. They painted the letters which had been cut out of wood using the laser cutter and decorated the individual pieces with either wool or paint. These were then attached to card and a cord hanger made to complete the piece..

I introduced the concept of the ‘Growth Mindset’ to our Key Stage 3 pupils during assembly this week, the idea being that if we put our mind to facing a difficult or challenging task or situation we can succeed. In lessons we then looked at things such as changing our language choices, for instance from saying ‘I can’t do this’ to ‘if I practise I will get better’ – a very positive outlook for the new year!

Mrs Thorpe

Happy New Year from Key Stage 4!

We started this new year on a celebratory note looking at the achievements of Key Stage 4 in Art. Our pupils have always made fantastic progress in this subject and last year’s GCSE results were exceptional. Our current module is focusing on the work of Manchester artist Geoffrey Key. Key was inspired to paint and draw by his mother who was also an illustrator. Year 10 and Year 11 have been focusing on producing work based on the face of the clown..

Last year’s GCSE group actually wrote and sent a piece to Key who responded back with not only some feedback but also the generous gift of a book of his work. It is certainly being put to good use this year!

This is a brilliant example of what our pupils can achieve and we aim to constantly celebrate the success of all our young people. This new year brings with it new challenges and we are very excited at the prospect of our new free school, The Springboard Project. We are looking forward to telling you more about Springboard and its curriculum offer later in the year here in our blog.

‘New year, new start’ has also seen us looking at a new ethos (or resolution) at driving the positive mind set for all our young people, so for our first blog we would like to leave you with this small ‘sticker’ of thought..

Mrs Tootill
Head of Springboard

You can find all our weekly blog entries here