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English
Here is a brief summary of the work of the English Department by year group.
Year 7 – Shakespearean project
- Visit by Globe Players who performed an hour long “Introduction to Shakespeare”
- All students watched and participated in the performance of key scenes from some of the more well known plays: “Romeo and Juliet”, “Macbeth”, “Twelfth Night”, “The Tempest” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
- This has been an excellent introduction to students to prepare them for studying Shakespeare at KS3 and for GCSE
Year 8 – National Newspaper project
- Visits will be made to the Education Centre at the Guardian and Observer Newsroom on 6 and 7 June 2006
- The Centre is equipped with state-of-the-art computers and scanners to help students engage with news
- Students will take part in a workshop called “Create the News” run by a journalist
- Students will report the news as it happens
- They are taught to research using websites used by journalists
- They encounter the real-life experience of making a newspaper
- They research, write and edit news stories, create headlines, and select and caption pictures
- They learn how editorial decisions are reached and how the news is made
- The final product is their own front page of their own newspaper!
Year 9 – Preparing for KS3 SATs
- Visit by a theatre company with a performance of scenes of “Macbeth” studied in preparation for the Y9 SATs tests
- Students invited to participate and make decisions about how the scene should be directed, how lines should be read and what the actors should do
- Focus on the play in performance to prepare them for SATs questions
- Students play an active and lively role, answering questions, offering their opinions and taking part
Year 10 - Wordplay project
In the first half of the summer term this year a group of Year 10 students took part in a project run by the school and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, with the financial backing of Deutsche Bank. The project was called Wordplay and, as the name suggests, was intended to enrich the students’ knowledge, enjoyment and understanding of language.
The school was allocated a professional actor/director to work with and he spent five sessions running workshops based around the play Romeo and Juliet, which the students had been studying as part of their GCSE course. These workshops were drama based and helped the students to better understand the effects and intentions of Shakespeare’s words. The students learned about performance and how language will affect it. They set, directed and performed for each other their own versions of one of the key scenes in Romeo and Juliet. This was all done in a relaxed, creative atmosphere where all the students felt comfortable and a full part of the process.
All who took part benefited enormously and very much enjoyed the final day’s trip to the Globe Theatre itself, where we were given a guided tour, free entry to the exhibition and, luckily, the chance to watch a rehearsal for that day’s matinee performance of Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’.
During the course of the project all the students earned an A-C grade in a piece of oral coursework, which will raise their chances of achieving a similar grade in their final exam.
This is the second such project the school has taken part in following the highly successful Sonnets project that was run last year. We hope to take part in next year’s project which will begin in October, although this depends on the previous funding continuing both for us and Globe Education.
- A group of Year 10 students take part in a project run by the school and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, with the financial backing of Deutsche Bank.
- These workshops were drama based and helped the students to better understand the effects and intentions of Shakespeare’s words.
- The students learned about performance and how language will affect it.
- They set, directed and performed for each other their own versions of one of the key scenes in Romeo and Juliet.
- This was all done in a relaxed, creative atmosphere where all the students felt comfortable and a full part of the process.