Kings Academy Ringmer - KAR Newsletter

Dear parents and carers,

I hope you have had a good week.

This week we celebrated World Book Week with an array of activities. The highlight was World Book Day, and I was delighted to see so much effort in bringing characters to life with some excellent outfits! The week has included a guest author, ‘flash fiction’ writing 50 word stories and students guessing staff members favourite book. Thank you to all staff and students who took part.

We also held our inaugural careers breakfast, which was a fantastic event involving years 7 & 8. A host of professions offered their time to come in and present to students on their chosen careers path. The event really brought to life our key value of ‘Ambition’, and we look forward to further events in the future.

I am delighted to advise that further to our Open evening and Open mornings, we have received a staggering 450 applications for 150 places in year 7 next year. We are conscious as a school that we can continually improve, however this serves as a key indicator for reputation and judgement based on parents considering local schools. I am committed to ensuring we build on the many strengths at this school, to ensure we are able to offer the best possible experience for our children.

One key area of review is achievement. We are looking at ways to further enhance our achievement structures and will soon be launching our PROUD (#proudtoberingmer) strategy to celebrate the excellent work that we see each day. Students will receive rewards based on showing:

P resentation of work
R esilience
O utstanding effort
U nderstanding
D rafting and responding to feedback

I look forward to celebrating work with students and parents when this strategy is launched in a few weeks.

Finally, I have been fortunate to receive a number of positive emails from members of the public regarding our students conduct, and specifically this week regarding their conduct on the buses. As you are aware, I have spent considerable time in communication with ESCC since starting this year to ensure that the bus service improves, and thankfully we appear to have finally ironed out a number of challenges. The email stated that the bus had been busy, and upon entering many Ringmer students found themselves standing. The member of the public cited that our students ‘behaviour was excellent, they were calm and relaxed, well mannered and cheerful’. A nice end to the week, and something which I have passed onto the students.

I hope you have a great weekend

Best wishes,

Mr Harvey

World Book Week

The school this week has been busy with activities for not only World Book Day but also a week of activities for students related to it.
We have seen art and crafts and black out poetry going on in the LRC during break and lunch as well as visiting published author, Georgia Byng, give a workshop on becoming a writer to a group of fantastic students. We have seen a 'guess the member of staff and their book' competition along with a 'Caught you being a reader' competition for the students who were seen outside of lessons reading. And on Thursday we saw World Book Day celebrated with a fantastic array of costumes from students and teachers alike, all in aid of raising some money for our library.

Thank you to everyone involved for making this a great week of passion around reading and the joys it can bring.

Author Visit

Students were treated to a special visit by bestselling author Georgia Byng to celebrate world book
day this week.

Georgia spoke so enthusiastically to the students about her creative writing process and how she
generates her ideas. We learnt how characters are brought alive and wonderful ideas for writing
your own short stories. Students were encouraged to give creative writing a chance and learned it
wasn’t always easy but to keep going as it’s a skill that can be improved on. They also learnt how
authors themselves have to overcome writing challenges.

We all discussed books that had stayed with us from childhood and the joy of reading stories for
pleasure. Students also got to hear about the behind the scenes process of putting a book together
and insights into writing as a career. It was motivating and inspirational.

Mrs Colbourne, School Librarian.

Careers Breakfast

As part of National Careers Week, on Monday Year 7 and 8 participated in a careers speed networking style event where they were able to meet an amazing group of adults from a diverse range of industries to hear about their career paths, jobs and how to get into their fields.

Our students got to speak to:

A course leader for biomedical science at Brighton Uni
A paramedic
Someone from the AV audio visual industry
A content creator, author and lecturer-sustainable fashion
An estate manager
An events manager for weddings / film
A soldier
A teacher
A body piercer and business owner
A BAFTA nominated cinematographer/ director of photography
An IT architect
The director of a software company
A property developer
and someone who works in PR, journalism/catwalk model/designs children's clothes/ wardrobe consulting and personal shopping!

It was a wonderful morning and the students got so much out of it! Thank you so much to the fantastic volunteers for their time!

Art Update

Year 9 have been learning the skill of monoprinting as part of the lessons as they grow into confident Artists.

They have created amazing outcomes, this process and outcome was done in one 50min Art lesson, what super stars they are.

Can you see which Artist we used for our reference?

Miss Hook.

Wakehurst Art Competition

Please see the poster regarding an art competition that East Sussex College are hosting in collaboration with Wakehurst Place, Southern Rail and Grove Garden.

The competition is FREE and open to all age groups.

Maths Update

With Year 11 really focussed on revision for their maths GCSE, students have or are being given
feedback sheets from the mocks. These are stuck in their exercise books and Y11 students should be
using this Question Level Analysis as the initial focus for revision. The first Maths exam is on
Thursday 16 th May, this is the only Non-Calculator exam in maths.

Can you do this question? This is a calculator question!

Great news, we entered about 60 students for the intermediate UKMT Challenge. This is a very challenging paper that year 10 or 11 students sit. It really is very hard at times and a deep knowledge of number, algebra and geometry are needed to solve these 25 problems. It is always interesting to see the joy in students’ eyes when I let them know they have been selected to take part in this mathematical challenge!

The questions start quite easy but progressively get harder as students work their way through the questions. Q25 is always a challenge!

Here is Q1, Q12 and Q20 I left out the hard ones!

Now the great news, 23 of our students achieved a Bronze certificate or higher.

In fact, 1 Gold, 6 Silver and 16 Bronze so well done everybody who took part and a special well done to those who achieved a certificate.

The Answers:

GCSE = You would (or could) use a Venn diagram to show that the answer HCF = 2x2x2x3x3x7=504 just out of interest the LCM would be 352800

The UKMT:

Hope everybody has a good Easter and so you know – the answers to the UKMT are not always D!

Mr Taylor.

Debate Club Update

So far this term we have debated the following motions - 'This House believes that......

the UK should rejoin the EU (carried),
that alcohol should be illegal (defeated) and
that cloning humans will be a good thing (defeated).

Coming up....Anyone should be able to come and live in the UK, taxation is a good thing, and students at King's Academy Ringmer should have more power.

Everyone is welcome - come along to G02 every Thursday lunchtime to listen or join in.
Ms Moorhouse.