Page 4 - Abberley Adventures - June 2021

ABBERLEY ADVENTURES
4
Academic Matters
It has been wonderful to have all of the Prep School children back in the classroom this half term and to see our revised timetable working so smoothly. Throughout the school, mornings have been a-buzz in Home Bases with children testing each other on their weekly spellings and trying to catch the staff out with some tricky words too! We have joined with Atom Learning, an online learning platform geared towards 11+ and senior school entry in Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning and lessons to develop these increasingly important skills have taken place weekly for children in Years 5 and 6. Whilst there is no need to do any extra at home, every pupil in the Prep School has access to their accounts outside of school as well.
Boarding
It has been fantastic to see a 25% increase in the number of children boarding this term and, as you will imagine, this has created a real buzz upstairs! Our weekends have been more popular than ever with many weekly and part-time boarders opting to come in and take part in some extremely exciting activities:
We enjoyed a St George’s Day themed weekend, complete with medieval feast and with the teachers taking to the stocks as well as inflatable jousting and an inflatable assault course! We also transformed the Sports Hall into a UV nerf arena for our first ever UV Nerf Wars and we welcomed Shooting4Fun to school to lead an afternoon of Laser Tag in our school woods along with a wide variety of teacher-led fun activities.
For pupils in Year 8 there has been plenty of revision as they head towards Common Entrance exams, which begin on June 8th. We wish them all the very best of luck. Pupils in younger years will have assessments in class but we do not wish to put additional pressure on them during what has been a challenging year so these will be ‘low key’. Pupils should please have the following equipment in school in readiness for assessments: a pencil case including a pen (and spare ink), pencil, ruler, eraser, a standard geometry set, some colouring pencils and those in Years 7 and 8 should also have a calculator.