On Monday 28th April, three of our courageous Year 7 students, Yu-Ting Chen, Annabelle Mutch and Emma Swindle, attended the Regional Final of the Spelling Bee for German in Cambridge.
The competition involved learning the meanings and spellings of 250 German words and then saying as many of them and spelling them using the German alphabet within a minute, in front of an audience in a lecture theatre. All three students were in the competition as the best 37 of an entry of 3306 entrants.
Emma has one a place in the National final taking place on Friday 27th at Magdeline College, University of Cambridge and means she will have to learn another 100 words, 350 in total.
We are proud of them all and wish Emma the very best in the final round. Watch this space!
Frau Yates
The week before half term 15 Year 8 and 9 students visited the capital of Estonia, Tallinn where approximately 40% of the population are native Russians and there are lots of Russian speakers.
Students enjoyed a whirlwind tour of what life was like in Estonia during the Soviet Union, discovered what the KGB might be interested in them for and where they would have ended up if they didn’t go along with party communist party lines. They also took a step back into Imperial Russia and visited Peter the Great’s house and palace, enjoying the art collection there.
Students particularly enjoyed the Russian lessons and visit to the school where they met young Russian speakers and exchanged ideas about their lives and hobbies. Tallinn has a beautiful Russian language theatre which offered the students the opportunity to enjoy a very novel staging of Figaro, which was visually very engaging even if they spoke very quickly.
The students thought the old town of Tallinn was very beautiful and made their own Russian dumplings at the Russian restaurant in the old town centre. They also ordered their own Russian pies in the pie shop. We were very lucky to enjoy Tallinn in the snow and the students represented Presdales very well in spite of extreme tiredness from such a packed programme.
Slightly belatedly for the Russians, the Year 7 Russian class marked Maslenitsa (pancake week) with pancake ordering, sushki bracelet making and singing. The students embraced the challenge of singing quite fast and made a rather pleasant sound by the end of it! Well done Year 7.
A group of students from Year 10 and 11 have been working extremely hard over the last few months to design, build and program a VEX robot. They took their robot over to John Warner School to compete in this year’s Robot Rumble competition. The students displayed fantastic teamwork, as they progressed through the competition, they developed their skills and deservedly won the skills challenge trophy.
Robot Rumble has provided students an opportunity to work with engineers from MBDA.
‘On Wednesday, we took part in the Vex V5 High Stakes Game at John Warner School. Before we spent many weeks designing, building and adapting our robot, with dreams to win. The main idea of the game was to collect rings and place them onto stakes, whilst working with another team in an alliance. On the day of the competition, we did last minute adjustments to our robot and code and did last minute additions to our log book in order to show the judges all our progress.
When we arrived, we saw all of the other team’s robots and realised that different teams focused more on different aspects of the game so they all looked different. At the beginning, there were 30 qualifying games, where everyone was put together with different teams in alliances to put the various teams in ranking order. After this, we were in 11th place and beat Richard Hale!
After a quick lunch break, all the teams lined up and chose an alliance for the main competition. As we were last to choose, we were placed in an alliance in Richard Hale. In the main competition, we ended up losing our first game and were therefore out of the competition.
However, there was a sub competition which we also entered called the Skills Competition. The aim was to get as many rings onto stakes as possible in a minute. We had three attempts and got 0, then 10 and then 10 points. Overall, we won this competition and received a trophy! We were very excited about this.’
Darcy and Emily
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Coming Up
Monday 16th to Friday 27th
Year 10 End-of-year Exams (Hall)
Monday 16th
Year 12 Learn4Living Day
Tuesday 17th / Wednesday 18th
Year 12 Personal Statement Workshop day
Thursday 19th
Year 12 Apprenticeship Workshop
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Presdales School
Hoe Lane
Ware
Hertfordshire
SG12 9NX
Tel: 01920 462210
admin@presdales.herts.sch.uk
Headteacher:
Mr Warren
