A glorious sunny week at Sunninghill this week and the end of our second assessment week. The children have worked very hard and have performed extremely well – and we are very proud of them all. As we talked about at length in our Academic Series, the purpose of our assessments is for us to see how the children are performing and to put in place any extra support they need. We do not want them to compare themselves against each other – only that they fulfil their own potential.
On that note, I was reminded this week of the philosopher who once said; ‘Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live it’s entire life believing it is stupid.’ Indeed, some people are much better at swimming than climbing, others better at the arts than the sciences, and some are better at sport than music. For this reason I am delighted that Sunninghill values academic excellence as highly as sport, music, drama, the arts along with compassion, creativity, commitment and courage. We celebrate all their successes in all forms.
On the subject of the performing arts, 50 of our children will be performing in our much anticipated Sunninghill’s Got Talent event tonight. These children will impress all of us with their incredible talent – but also show us their courage, to stand out in front of you all, creativity in their performances, their commitment to practice and their compassion for their fellow contestants. We wish them all the very best of luck.
As the children in Forms 3 and 4 are learning about the Rainforests and the orangutans, Forms 3 and 4 were lucky enough to have a visit from Annie, who is part of Monkey World’s outreach programme. Form 4 are going to be busy fund raising over the next few weeks to raise enough money to adopt an orangutan as part of the PSHE, Money Matters unit. As a thank you, Monkey World will then let Form 3 and Form 4 visit Monkey World towards the end of this term for free! The Form 4 cake sale will be next Wednesday 14th June.
Thinking about our planet, yesterday junior prep celebrated World Ocean Day. They have been discussing how much we value the seas around us and how we need to protect them. They chose to highlight the issue of plastic in the ocean and the dangers it causes to fish. We made a giant fish collage made out of all the plastic rubbish we had lying around in our bins and homes. Form 5 enjoyed their ICT lesson using the new school drone to film the creation of our giant fish! The collage was very effective and gave the children a lot to think about.
We are very grateful to our School Council who ordered some fabulous new games and toys for breaktimes. We now have 3 new badminton nets, a croquet set, some space hoppers, a giant connect 4 and some football cones. The children have loved playing with all these new toys in the gorgeous summer sun.
I enjoyed heading over to Bryanston on Wednesday for some fabulous cricket matches with Senior Prep. The children had some great successes and it is wonderful to see them enjoying the game so much. Last night I also had the pleasure of joining the sailing club at Weymouth and Portland Sailing Academy. It was a fabulous evening – and the weather was just perfect – sunny, windy and with the appearance of a beautiful dolphin right at the end of the session!
Nursery and Junior Prep were working hard today practising for sports day! I am so excited about all of our sports days and know the children are going to have such fun!
It was fantastic to see our Form 8 entrepreneurs hard at work yesterday getting orders for their business products, ready for our Summer Fayre on Saturday 1st July. Our Lion’s Lair project, Sunninghill’s version of Dragon’s Den, is run each year for our Form 8’s. Each team has to learn about how to set up a business – from coming up with commercially viable ideas and researching their target markets, to sales and customer relations. They made a presentation of their experience to a panel of judges (the “Lions”), professional women and men from a range of backgrounds.
Our 3 teams, ‘Fudge it’, ‘Case Closed’ and ‘Wags and Whiskers’ all hope to raise the most money, and all of the profits will be given to their chosen charity. We hope you will support them at the Summer Fayre!
Thank you to all of you who have supported our Summer Holiday Club! We have had a tremendous response already and several mornings are already fully booked – particularly for our younger years. For full details and the booking form, please go to our website:
Finally we hope to see as many of our grandparents as possible on our Grandparent Afternoon Tea, on Monday 26th June at 2.30pm. It will be a chance for your child to tour their grandparents, show them their classroom, and enjoy an afternoon tea with some fabulous entertainment.
Have a wonderful weekend!
Best wishes
David
