I hope you all had a good half term. Our Main Assembly, to be held next Monday, will, of course, celebrate St. David’s Day. We are all looking forward to planned festivities to mark the occasion.
Upon our return to school this week our Year 10 students embarked upon internal school examinations and settled into the rhythm of things effectively. In addition, students in Year 12 spent Tuesday morning developing their technique to maximise performance in their Welsh Bacc. Individual Project.
It was great to see so many parents / carers of our Year 9 students at our feedback, advice and guidance evening on Thursday. This is such an important time in a student’s school life and we were thrilled to be able to provide support and assistance to all of you, whilst keeping you updated on your son / daughter’s progress in individual subject areas. Whether you have further questions with regard to the options process or would like to discuss pastoral or academic issues, please do get back to us at your earliest convenience and we will, of course, be available to help further.
Many congratulations to Sophie, Elin and Alesha who were all part of North Wales Dragons U16 squad and were crowned champions at the Welsh Netball Regional Championships last weekend. They were actually undefeated winning 7 out of 7 games and will now represent North Wales in the Welsh National Finals in Bangor on 4th April. Really well done also to Abi and Poppy (Year 10) who played for Deeside and also qualified for the next stages of their competition.
In further sporting news, we have just taken a team of Year 7 and 8 students to a Bouldering Competition held at the Boardroom in Queensferry. All team members had tutoring to get them climbing and then participated in a tournament against other schools. Everyone had fun, and our Year 7 girls did exceptionally well to qualify for the next round.
Today our Year 12 Geographers have been on a fieldtrip to Betws-y-Coed and we also held a Welsh transition event for a number of students from local primary schools. We do this annually across the curriculum in order to welcome younger students to Castell Alun and help them in their preparations for joining our family in September. Indeed, next week we will hold a Year 6 Writing transition event on Monday and Tuesday.
On Wednesday next week our GCSE PE Year 11 students will be hoping for their best performances in their Practical Examination moderation event. We’re sure you’ll be fantastic! Also on Wednesday our A level Drama class will be treading the boards to impress their external examiner. I believe the phrase is ‘break a leg’!
On Thursday some of our Year 9 students will attend a ‘Justice in a Day’ workshop at the Crown Court in Mold and a number of Year 7 students will go on a ski trip to Chill Factore.
Thursday 5th March is also World Book Day – a global celebration of reading, authors and illustrators. As I mentioned last week, Years 7 and 8 are taking part in a sponsored ‘readathon’, with proceeds being donated to ‘Read for Good’; a charity that motivates children to read because they know, as do we, that reading changes lives. Students will be keen to ‘get caught reading’, as to be found so will mean these students will be given a ticket and entered into a prize draw! Year 9 will hold a ‘Big Book Bake Sale’ on the Wednesday also. Live readings will be performed by members of staff over the school PA system at various times during the week.
Finally, we’ll soon be holding the school annual ‘Lock Down’ drill. I will email you all with further information to this end but you may wish to speak to your children about this regular event which all schools are required to hold at least once per year in order to help prepare for a serious threat to school, even though such an event is, of course, extremely unlikely to ever occur.
I hope you all have a good week.