School Blog

Clay is something we get very excited about in the Art Department as its properties allow us to devise projects using slabs, coils and solid sections. It enables the girls to express their ideas in three dimensions through extruding tools, kidneys, wire loops, knives, slip and of course hands.

You may have seen the GCSE Egyptian Canopic Jars outside in Cripps Court at the Arts Festival in June. These can now be seen in our current display in the Senior School Foyer. The jars have been hand finished with underglazes and a metallic lustre. Shoe polish acted as a useful stain, rubbed in after the biscuit firing at 1060 degrees in our electric kiln.

The girls’ visit to London really helped to inspire the group to create an authentic look for these coiled sculptures, after examining original jars in the British Museum.

 

A New Product in Town

This term sees the introduction of a medium which allows us even more freedom due to its unique composition. Paper clay combines paper pulp bonded and mixed within the clay body. It is an exciting development in the ceramics field. Easy to use; it is extremely strong in the unfired state, simple to repair at nearly every stage in the forming process, and the final glazed and fired result looks similar to conventional clay. The result is lighter than normal. Paper clay is great when used to make delicate sculptural forms and is flexible, providing us with exciting possibilities.

U3N are the first group to use this as we investigate ‘Nature’. The girls are using the American artist Elizabeth Shriver as an influence for their beautifully handcrafted sculptures. I have asked the class to focus on the aesthetics of three dimensional forms rather than the function of design in the pottery industry.

During class I said “imagine you are designing a piece for display in a hallway or lounge as opposed to something to be used in the kitchen”. The girls are indeed moving away from pots and vessels, using their design sheets to problem solve balance and construction with annotated solutions noted for future reference during the making process. Inspiration comes from marine life, seeds, pods and cones – much like Shriver.

Glazes can still be applied as a finishing decoration; U3H are going to use a neutral glaze so the viewers’ attention is focused on form, without the distraction of colour. This is a different approach to the stoneware turtle that Samantha Hynes in U5S has recently made which she dipped and double dipped into glaze buckets. Samantha then finished off with brushing combinations of Yellow Brown and New Frog Green coloured glazes onto the shell. It is important to match the glaze colours and technique with the character of the work.

 

The Great NHS Throw Down

U3N will be having a ‘Potter’s Wheel Taster Session’ where each girl will have the opportunity to throw a pot as part of their ceramics experience. I am really looking forward to seeing what can be achieved after they have centred the clay on the bat and mastered the sensitivity of the pedal which controls the speed! Girls are welcome to have their ‘Taster Session’ during Art Club on Wednesday if they wish. Look out for the Throw Down results on Twitter through our Creative Arts Account.

You can also watch the Great British Throw Down on BBC2 on Tuesdays at 9pm. Maybe this will inspire you to purchase a wheel for Christmas but remember a wheel is not just for Christmas!

For more details about working with clay and paper clay please click here.

Mrs Mel Beacroft

Head of Creative Arts

It is very easy to judge a good lesson in a School by how happy the pupils are during and after the content has been delivered. However, following a recent training course I am now aiming, believe it or not, to make children unhappy in class, to take them out of their comfort zone. The fact of the matter is that most children, and girls especially, are desperate to be good and to receive praise from their teacher for getting questions right. From a very early age children learn that the easier the task is the higher the likelihood that they will be able to demonstrate their intelligence with a correct answer and get that positive feeling when they are told that they are right or that they are clever. This feeling is a nice one, it makes them happy and therefore it is addictive and can be desired throughout our classrooms. The problem of course is that it can make children reluctant to tackle more complex tasks for fear that they will be unable to receive the praise that they crave; this is what we would commonly refer to as ‘coasting’.  There is also a tendency for coasting children to shy away from tasks where there is more than one possible answer or problems which can be tackled with a variety of methods. 

The aim, of course, is to ensure that there is sufficient challenge for all pupils at all times in our lessons. Just as it is wrong to make work too easy it is also wrong to make it too hard. If children cannot understand a concept initially they are going to be de-motivated and the end product will be unsatisfactory. This where the concept of ‘Learning Pit Theory’ comes in and allows us to encourage our pupils to demand suitably challenging tasks which will allow them to be stretched intellectually and seek the self-satisfaction that comes from being able to do something that was previously beyond them.

If the level of challenge is judged correctly a ‘cognitive wobble’ will be introduced which means that new questions will be asked of the individual and they will not be able to complete the task easily or straight away. This is when they enter the ‘Learning Pit’ and have to discover/practice new skills, undertake research, work as a team, ask appropriate questions to allow them to progress through the task. Greater clarity of understanding will gradually be realized as 

they start to climb out of the pit and there is likely to be a EUREKA moment when the activity is completed or they have achieved something for the first time.  This eureka moment brings with it some extremely strong and valuable emotions, such as pride, joy and satisfaction, which can be equally addictive and far better in the long run. 

The aim of this theory is that pupils will demand suitably challenging work from their teachers and not be content with tasks that do not stimulate them intellectually- asking for harder work because they want to have the eureka moment again and again and again. Those are children that I would like to have in my classroom! There is a reason why the word eureka is used to describe the sensation that is felt when a pupil climbs out of the learning pit- eureka in Greek means, ‘I found it!’ which is much better than my teacher or peers found it and gave it to me. 

Of course I do not want my classes full of unhappy children but I do want children who are receptive to challenge and who have the confidence to try new things, to persevere, to apply thinking skills and demonstrate resilience in pursuit of EUREKA. 

The Learning Pit Theory was devised by James Nottingham and more information can be found at www.challenginglearning.com

Ross Urquhart, Head of Junior School

Well actually it has changed a lot since the day when I started teaching in 1978. Back then the basic equipment needed by any teacher was a box of sticks of chalk, a red pen, and your mark book.

 

The chalk we carried around in order to remove any chance that the students might have had to tamper with them in any way. This was a popular trick and one to be avoided wherever possible.

 

The chalk created clouds of dust which got into my hair and clothes and seemed almost to permeate my skin. Cleaning the board rubber was not a job that I enjoyed and I welcomed any offer to help from an eager year 7 pupil to clean the rubber which usually involved making clouds of dust.

In addition to the basic equipment I had board protractor and compasses which were so difficult to operate. They were large and difficult to hold still on the blackboard and too often the chalk fell out. It also didn’t help that when I was using the equipment I stood with my back to the class obscuring their view. No wonder my pupils found using a protractor so difficult.

Some topics in Mathematics have changed little over the years. The trigonometry that we teach is basically the same as that which was taught 300 years ago. I am sure that the problem shown in a textbook from 1725 would be familiar to the girls now. However the techniques used to calculate the solution will now be very different.

Before 1984 there were no calculators allowed in public examinations and we had none in school. In order to calculate the answer to tricky problems the basic method involved the use of log tables. Many lessons were spent teaching the students how to manage the tables before the skill could be used in any application.

 

If you were very lucky you might have a slide rule. This was a very sophisticated piece of equipment and students in the top sets were encouraged to have one and displayed them proudly in class. The scales on the rule were logarithmic and the way that they worked depended on the laws of logarithms. The students were not really aware of this. The magic was that it worked more quickly than using their tables.

In the 1960s a move was made to modernise the Mathematics syllabus and in the 1970s  we found ourselves teaching what became known as modern or new maths. The new topics that were taught included Venn diagrams, number bases, topology and matrices. Some of these are still taught in schools today but topology or “rubber-sheet geometry” has yet to make a come-back.

I also taught computing without sight of a computer in the classroom! The students had to enter coded instructions onto cards in pencil. I would then take the cards to the university centre whey they would be encoded onto paper tape and the program would be run with a printout of the results. The following week I would collect the tape and print-outs and take them to my class where they would try to de-bug the program that they had written and write fresh instructions on new cards.

The process took several weeks before the students could finish their program and complete the set task.

In preparing this I was amazed to find out how much has changed since I first started teaching. The use of calculators has enabled students to tackle much harder calculations which means that now we can and do teach a lot more statistics that before. However their algebraic and geometric skills today are less well developed as the curriculum includes more varied topics which take time away from the more traditional teaching. There are plenty of changes to the GCSE that are going on now and new A Level courses set to start in two years’ time. But I am sure that the teaching of Mathematics will continue to evolve. What will it be like in another forty years?

 

Mrs Cowell, Head of Faculty Mathematics

As I was scrubbing my hands after a couple of very enjoyable hours in my garden recently, it struck me just how therapeutic working with the soil can be.

Recent studies have shown how much gardening can contribute to one’s physical and mental well-being. There is nothing better than tending a plot of ground, however small, planting a few seeds and watching them grow into something beautiful and maybe even edible.

 

Few people can deny how good home grown produce can taste and picking a ripe fruit from your own tree, that you have seen start as a tiny bud, then a flower in the exuberance of spring, becoming a growing fruit in the summer and finally maturing  in all the mellow splendour of the autumn sun is just magical.

It doesn’t just happen though; tending a garden is hard work, digging the soil, enriching it with compost, cutting back plants and recycling them into new compost, mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges to name just a few tasks, but what a promoter of health and all in the great outdoors, with fresh air and sunshine, in tune with nature. What could be better?

Just a few hours working in the garden is such a good stress buster;  being able to enjoy the rewards later of standing back to admire a freshly dug seed bed, a crop of vegetables or a border of beautiful flowers, and all this without a mobile phone, screen or device to be seen!

Gardens have over millennia been places of contemplation, spaces to unwind and re-connect with one’s equilibrium. Monks walked in the cloistered gardens of their medieval monasteries, academics use the quads of university colleges to contemplate their work and even office workers escape at lunch time to the nearest park to be away from the hustle and bustle of today’s fast moving world.

 

We can do that too. In a garden we can enjoy the simplicity of just “being”, of listening to the birds and insects as they go about their daily lives and we can simply enjoy each season for what it is and its variety and beauty.

The benefits of gardening are overwhelming to our well-being. Recently Dr Sarah Wollaston, MP and Chair of the health Select Committee, herself a GP, promised that the Government would fund an enquiry into the benefits of gardening, with a view to making it available on prescription from the NHS. Let’s wait and see what becomes of that one…..

We however can do so much, even on a small scale, in our own gardens, houses, or here at school. We have recently re-vamped the wildlife area at the far end of the school estate and have made the pond and surrounding area more suitable for use by pupils of all ages across any possible curriculum area from nursery to sixth form.

In the pond there is special dipping area complete with boardwalk and areas for creatures to climb out of the water should they fall in.

Nearby is a purpose built bug-shack for the insects to over-winter and breed and a seating area of log stools forms an outside classroom for all to use.

In Junior School we have our sensory garden, where children can be introduced to nature at a very early stage through the beauty of sight, sound, touch and smell. They even have a mud kitchen where they can bake and cook using sterilised soil. The sunflowers below were planted and grown by the girls in our Junior School and produced a magnificent display outside the classrooms for everyone to enjoy. The seed heads will now be left to dry to provide food for the birds in the coming winter months.

 

Connecting with nature and growing things at a young age unlocks a world of magical fascination and discovery. You don’t need a lot of land, anyone can grow a seed in a pot on the windowsill and the responsibility that is bestowed upon you to make sure it is looked after, watered, fed, potted on and harvested creates a feeling of well-being and self-worth, where an individual is essential for the survival of something else other than just themselves. It has been scientifically proven that by looking after plants, humans focus less on their own problems and worries and become more objective and balanced. This is certainly something that many people, young and old would find beneficial.

We can all do more to connect with nature a little, take my advice and put a vase of flowers on your desk or table, grow a seed or bring pot plants into your home or office and you will soon see the benefits of what they bring into your life.

 

Lesley Davies

Senior Deputy Head