Year Nine

For information about Year 9 Options see the Year 9 Options page.

Danielle Ireland took her Tae Kwon-do Black belt in October after four long years of working up through the different coloured belts, passing with flying colours.  In front of a five person panel she had to perform patterns, line work and sparring as well as learning all the moves and what they mean in Korean.  She is hoping to carry on for many years to come!

Jessica Harding has been sailing her Topper dinghy for a number of years, so successfully she has now been selected for the National Intermediate Junior Squad!  As one of only 16 girls in the country she spends at least one winter training with the squad all over the country.  In the summer she spends most weekends competing in her boat.  Do we have an Olympic sailor in the making?

Nearly 40 year 9 students from 9E and 9W have been involved with Bristol University’s Peer project.  This pilot project is using three schools in the area to study the impact of the built environment upon physical activity levels.  Pupils wore GPS tracking devices that also monitored their activity levels for a week. The devices have now been returned and Bristol University are studying the results to feedback later in the year when we may also be involved in further studies.

Congratulations to the girls netball team for playing so well in the tournament on the 17^th November.  Eight girls took part and each one played spectacularly!  The match took place at Wellsway School where Chew played 3 other teams.  Sadly we did not win the tournament however it was a lot of fun.  Well done Freddie Cardew, Charlotte Fowler, Kay Doweny, Jess Harindg, Holly Williams, Amy Batt and Ellie Grace.  Also all the girls would like to say thank you to Miss Butcher for all the help and hard work you have invested to make us a better team.   Alice Cotterill

We are the Youth Involvement Group (YIG).  We have been working with Off The Record Bath and Comic Relief on a National project raising awareness about violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) which includes (teenage relationship abuse, sexual bullying in school and gender equalities.  Last year we developed a PSRE teacher resource pack to be used in our PSRE lessons and in other schools across B&NES.  We have been involved in fun interactive activities through discussions, written and case study role plays which has raised our awareness.

This year we created an on line survey to find out how our school feels about issues such as safety, equal respectful relationships, sexual bullying and gender equalities.  We have some really interesting results.  Overall our school is very safe although we still found some room for improvements.  So to decide on what area we need to work on we held a voting event.  We tied this in with the national campaign ‘End violence and abuse’ white ribbon campaign.  We held assemblies in each year group and asked everyone to come along and vote for what they felt was important for them to improve in our school.  We did this by asking everyone to pick a topic that was colour coded and vote for the colour by stamping their hand on a sheet of paper to make a hand print.  We will now be adding up all the hand prints and putting an action plan together.

Also in June 2012 we will be presenting our work and what we have leaned to our Local Authority Education Department.  Other professionals who work with children and young people and the Comic Relief team – watch out for more updates.  Holly and Hazel.

Cross country was held on the first Wednesday back after half term.  Halfway through the day a coach of students were taken to Old Down playing fields, where the B&NES cross country championships were taking place. The year nines were Charlie MacDonald, Ross Harding, Jake Sparks, Perry Cunio and the girls were Izzy Morgan, India Rogers, Nancy Portsmouth and Jazz Hill.  Everyone did really well, and tried their hardest. We had some great results with Charlie MacDonald coming in at 2^nd, Ross Harding at 21^st and Jake Sparkes not far behind.  As well as that all the girls tried their hardest and worked well together as a team.            Charlie