Bore da,
It’s been lovely to see more of our new Year 7 intake students over recent days and to sense their joy and excitement about joining Castell Alun.
This week has seen various trips from school, including to the Eisteddfod in Llangollen, Belgium and Germany, and Berlin and Poland. We will provide a short report on each of these in next week’s final Blog of the year. At Castell Alun we are very fortunate to be able to provide enriching experiences for our students outside the traditional classroom setting and are grateful to all those staff who give of their time and expertise freely to be able to make such ventures possible.
On Tuesday this week, 16 students took part in Wellbeing Training Day and received basic training on topics such as safeguarding and mental health. Our plan is to build a trained group of Student Wellbeing Ambassadors in school next term in order that these trained youngsters will be able to provide a watchful service and friendly support to their peers, alongside the provision we are able to offer through staff specialists.
On Wednesday eleven of our Year 12 vocational pathway students participated in a taster of a recruitment assessment day at Burton Manor. The day included one-to-one interviews, psychometric testing and a group communication task. The students gained the opportunity to develop crucial employability skills such as interview techniques, problem solving and interacting with people from a range of backgrounds. The Castell Alun students were brilliant; well-presented, respectful, and open to new experiences! A special thanks to Peter, Jennifer and the team at Burton Manor and The Russell Taylor Group for providing our students for this incredibly rewarding experience. We are very fortune to have made this connection through the Young Chamber.
This weekend a large number of students from Castell Alun will embark upon their Silver Duke of Edinburgh expedition and next week (Monday to Thursday) a further cohort of our students will undertake their Gold expedition for the scheme and thus reach the very pinnacle of training and development in this specific skill set. We know they are going to be successful and are extremely proud of these highly motivated and very talented individuals.
On Friday next week, we will hold our school Sports Day. The forecast looks reasonable at present. However, please do ensure that all students come prepared for the day with sufficient sun cream and water bottles, or a light rain jacket should that be required!
Well done to our Year 7 rounders team this week, who played in the Flintshire County play night at Elfed High School. Our team played 3 games and won two of them, drawing one game only and this left us in first place overall. Da iawn everybody! A further well done to Oscar (Year 9) who competed successfully in the Welsh Open Skiing Championships in Llandudno last week. Once again Oscar put together a high-powered performance, competing successfully against extremely tough opposition.
Enjoy your weekend / Mwynhewch y penwythnos