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The Newcastle SUMDOG maths competition has just finished, and here are the winners. All top ten spots went to GEMS' pupils! Jeffrey is City champion, having got 973 out of 1000 questions correct in just one week. Well done to all our winners for a great achievement.
On Tuesday 16th January, the six of us, (the Guide Dogs for the Blind-MEAMSH Key Group) got the chance to go back to the guide dog centre in Four Lane Ends. This time, we got to witness a guide dog in training. We met 5 of their guide dogs – some were professional guide dogs, ready to meet their companions.
Two of our boys from Year 8 recently had an amazing opportunity to experience university life during a day and a half experience run by Newcastle University. Murphy and Conner joined another 150 pupils for a whole range of activities among which were a campus challenge, making a nest for a Dodo, learning about heart disease and taking measurements of their own heart beat, computing activities including connecting buildings to different servers, and activities based on the World Wars.
On Thursday 11th, all year sevens went to the hall and experienced a drug workshop. As we are getting older, we need to be aware of risks and potential situations that we may get into. Most importantly, we need to be aware what to do in those situations.
Children from Years 5, 7 and 8 all went to the Centre for Life to learn about maths.
On the 14th January, the Year 6 girls went on a trip to an historic place called the Victoria Tunnels. The tunnels might not be particularly “well known” but it has been part of Newcastle for nearly 200 years! Part of its 200 year service has been for “coal transportation” from a colliery to the River Tyne (The advantage of that was that the colliery could deliver coal to the other side of Newcastle cheaper) and it served as “The Safest place in Newcastle” as it was Newcastle’s Air Raid shelter in World War 2 (did you know when it was an air raid shelter, the original plan was for it to shelter 9000 people, but only 7000 people went to the shelter!)
On Monday the 13th of January, year 6 boys went to the metro centre to watch “Early Man”. There was a very expectant air because lots of us had seen Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run or Shaun the Sheep so we had high standards for the film to meet. We endured the long metro trip to the station and boarded another train to the metro centre. There were some very mixed opinions about the film, mostly negative, but we encountered many different characters, such as Hognob, Dug and many, many more. At the end we had to fill in a form to show which character we liked most, which bit we liked most and various other things.
Well done to our best French spellers of the week. These are the top ten students in the French Spelling Bee competition. Keep up the good work!
On the 1st February 2018 a few lucky children had the exciting chance to watch Peter Darrell’s ‘the nutcracker’ at the Theatre Royal. It was a fantastic show! The Nutcracker is about little girl called Clara, as she drifts off to sleep on Christmas Eve. She meets her Prince she is then confronted by a battle of larger-than-life mice and rats, and is whisked into the luscious land of sweets.
Big news today as GEMS basketball team took down rivals Gosforth Central in a dramatic sudden death shoot out. The undefeated side also thrashed local school Gosforth Junior Academy 6-0 in the round robin stage of the year 5 Hoops for Health competition. Due to their excellent run of form, they then had the chance to play in front of 3,000 fans at half time at Sports Central in the big game Newcastle Eagles vs Sheffield Sharks! The game took place on Friday 19th of January.
Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle’ is the 3rd Jumanji film, and the lucky KS2 were given the chance to go and see it and meet its amazing characters: Dr Smolder Bravestone, Ruby Roundhouse, Prof Shelly Oberon, Moose Finbar and Alex (a pilot). This great film featured some well-known names such as, Jack Black and Dwayne Johnson, but what did people think?
In a previous Newsletter we wrote about the Lit and Phil Young Writers Competition. Well, fourteen entries from Year 7 were submitted. On Wednesday all the entrants went to the Lit and Phil to find out the winners, and GEMS won not once, not twice, but three times! Samaha won the fiction category, Freya K. the non-fiction category and Katie P. was runner up.
We though that you might like to read one of the entries just to get an idea of the quality of the work produced. Here is Charlie’s poem in response to this year’s theme ...Journey.
It’s nineteen seventy-seven,
Two rockets soaring to heaven,
A planetary procession,
From the planetary precession,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune,
Aligned perfectly, once in a blue moon.
An astounding delight,
Watching the rockets, heat and light,
Slowly rising, mesmerizing,
Into the night, out of sight,
Towards the giants,
In their world of silence.
Over the passage of time…
Jupiter looms slowly, sublime,
Europa, her moon,
Icy, immune,
Next the slingshot,
And the receding red spot.
Further on they go,
Guided by radio,
More distant Titans,
Human expectation heightens,
Past Saturn, ring after ring,
By Uranus and Neptune, they swing.
Now they take flight,
Through the weakening starlight,
Toward the dark, this latter-day ark,
Into the deep,
Going to sleep,
In the eternal cold, disc shining gold.
Born a generation before I,
To charge to the sky,
And millennia hence,
Reveal mankind to friends
Hostile? or peaceful? although,
probably, I’ll never know.
What we particularly like in Charlie’s poem is some of the very evocative images … we loved ‘the latter-day ark’...and his clever manipulation of rhyme—using full, half and internal rhyme. Well done Charlie!
