TRINITONIAN 14 July 2019

SCHOOL PAGES
GLENWOODHOUSE
PREPARATORY
Our Senior Primary pupils just love
performing Shakespeare!
Our Senior Shakespeare group in
costume for the annual Shakespeare
Schools Festival production of ‘The
Taming of the Shrew’.
Leads from ‘The Taming of
the Shrew’, Petrucio and
Kate, in action.
The Shakespeare Festival adds a
wonderful dynamic to our pupil’s
learning.
Two of our stars in action.
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women
merely players;
They have their exits and their
entrances;
And one man in his time plays
many parts”
– William Shakespeare
How do we measure academic excellence?
Should it be by the black and white mark
achieved on a report? Is it judged by the
teacher’s comment? Academic excellence can
be defined as “the demonstrated ability to perform,
achieve, or excel in scholastic activities.” While part of
academic excellence involves achieving high grades
and demonstrating superior performance academically,
we believe academic excellence is more than just
achieving excellent results. There is so much that we do
and learn at school that is not graded or assessed but
also adds to an excellent, holistic education.
A great example is when our Grade 6 pupils spent time
learning about puppetry, designing puppets, writing
scripts and directing their own puppet shows. This
provided a variety of different learning opportunities
and experiences enjoyed by everyone. Some activities
were assessed, and others were just part of the
process, and not assessing these aspects doesn’t make
them less important. The process (journey) is just as
important as the end result (destination)!
Digital Literacy is important to us and we are privileged
to have our own GO Lab. Although GO Lab is not an
examinable subject, it’s a place to put the principles
of inquiry-based learning into practice daily. Currently,
we’re guiding our pupils to code. We say ‘guiding’
for good reason. We believe that coding and
computational thinking is something which should be
exercised and not copied. Telling the pupil exactly how
to do something leads to cookie cutter coders. They
need to wrestle through how to create that game or
solve that problem themselves or in group work rather
than be told exactly how to do it.
Our pupils are very busy on both the sporting and
cultural fronts at the school, which is all vital to a child’s
development.
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