Yesterday evening we had a lovely dinner in the Sheraton hotel, to say goodbye to Kristi Sinnett, the head of boarding, who is retiring, and also to celebrate the link with Wycombe Abbey. The headmaster (Paul Wallace-Woodroffe), the two deputy heads (Phil Dearden and David Griffiths), head of primary (Hayley Rensburgh), Wycombe Abbey's international director, Sara Brazendale, Patrick Hoey from BE education and me were all treated to an absolutely delicious meal with 6 courses! There were speeches, principally to pay tribute to Kristi, with tales from 4 years ago when the school had less than 10 students and they boarded in a hotel. It has grown so rapidly, with over 300 students now and due to be almost 600 in September, so that is a big success story but clearly such fast growth brings its own challenges. There was even a nice thank you speech to me for coming out here, too.
This morning I did the first of my whole year group practical sessions. I had 19 year 7 (U3) girls and boys, split over two rooms, and first I set them the challenge to build the tallest tower they could to support a golf ball, using just jelly babies and spaghetti. The idea here is that they use their ideas of what sort of shapes and structures are the strongest, and apply the engineering cycle of designing, building, testing, modifying their design, re-testing etc. They should not eat the jelly babies til the end, but a few always get tempted! Team work was good and our winners made a tower 26cm high that stood up to the test (see below).
For the second part of the lesson, the students had to design their own experiment to see how temperature affects the bounciness of a squash ball. Basically the idea here is that they heat the squash ball in water, using a burner, measure the temperature, and at certain temperature intervals take the ball out (with tongs!), drop it from a fixed height and record how high it bounces. Lots of opportunity to discuss how to make the experiment reliable, fair, safe etc. Again they threw themselves into the task enthusiastically, most getting up to 90 or even close to 100 degrees, discovering that the hotter ball bounced about 3 times as high as the one at room temperature, and the fastest groups even had time to plot a graph of their results. We discussed their findings, gave (edible!) prizes for the best teams and sent them away happy! They do really relish the chance to do experiments, something I gather there is not a lot of traditional chinese schools.
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| dinner at the sheraton |
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| Spaghetti and jelly baby towers |
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| bouncing squash balls |
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