Into the Season of Kindness

Small Acts of Kindness

Mr Phillips took sometime away from the school's budget to encourage our students to think about how they can make a big difference with a small act of kindness.  Students watched a short film of such small acts, picking up a piece of litter, helping someone off a bus, holding open a door.  

 These small actions take only a moment but impact on others and are remembered.

  Lucy, Mateo and our senior prefects then supported Mr Phillips by sharing a roving microphone with the students to enable anyone in the assembly to share a story...

 Mr Phillips then shared his story; his act of kindness helped to save the life of a stranger by donating stem cells and that this one small act has made a huge difference to his life and his friendship with the family.

The First Sign of Christmas

Each year, as the festive season approaches, the MFL department likes to host a German biscuit-making session. On Wednesday 27th November, year 7 students joined Mrs Sweetman, Hannah (our German assistant) & Cyrille (our French assistant) in the HT department after school to make Zimtplätzchen (cinnamon biscuits). Following a recipe in German, the students mixed the ingredients carefully and rolled out their dough. Festive cookie cutters were used to make the biscuits and the trays were placed in the preheated ovens. After slightly longer than anticipated, the biscuits were ready! The students enjoyed the session and learnt some important baking skills along with some new German words and phrases. A big thank you to Mrs Vadi who let us use her room and was a massive help throughout the session. Frohe Weihnachten 🎄

Working as a Team!

English with 8CE

8CE have been working really hard on both their independence and their ability to collaborate and use each other’s expertise to their benefit. In today’s lesson the class worked in groups, with team captains on six short poetry projects of their choice, all to do with the poem we have been studying:

1) a rewrite of the poem from a different perspective. 

2) a group presentation and rap (Mr Collins definitely did not choose this part!)

3) a drama script based on the poem. 

4) a poem storyboard. 

5) an Instagram post, annotated, about the poem. 

6) write a short story based on the poem. 

Having team captains gave six students the opportunity to work on their leadership skills, deciding which project their group would be most effective at, as well as leading their group through their work, directing their expertise appropriately. 

Working within their groups, students worked collaboratively with each other with a real emphasis on how they speak to each other within groups, as well as how they respond to each other’s suggestions and advice. 

At the conclusion of each project, each captain delivered their group’s work to the rest of the class in the form of a presentation of both their ideas and their creativity. 

Through this lesson 8CE really demonstrated that they have the ability to collaborate well and think completely outside the box when working independently with very little teacher support.
Well done 8CE

Mr G Collins

Schools County Futsal Tournament

On the 28th November, 6 of the u13 girls football team and 6 of the u15 girls football team travelled to Guildford Spectrum to take part in the first round of the Schools County Futsal Tournament. 

Both teams came up against steep competition, playing relentlessly for each of the 15 minute games. The girls had to quickly get accustomed to the rules and fast paced nature of the game. 

However, success was had for both Winston teams, as the u15s achieved second place and the u13s won! As a result- the u13s team have now progressed to the Regional rounds (dates to be confirmed!).

The PE Department hopes that the girls continue to be excited about Futsal and will look to run more training sessions for both teams! 

Congratulations to all players involved!

 

Last Summer I gave you ...

Enjoy the Video!

Our students have been engaging with the challenging topic of 'On-Line Safety', in Mrs Smith's Winston Extra lessons.

Click and play the outcome from one group; the students were very excited that their work would be blogged.  There will be more to follow in the coming weeks!!!

Sharing our Music

Join Us!

We would love to share our music with you and warmly invite you to join us at any or all of the following events.  Our students enjoy music making together and this time of year offers so many opportunities to celebrate.

TeenTech

TeenTech!

Ten Year 8 Winston students (Catrin, Alex, Callum, Emma, Emily, Bo, Seven, Poala, Hannah and Emaan) threw themselves whole-heartedly into their day at TeenTech. The day consisted of several challenges which required, amongst other things, the students use their initiative and knowledge of modern Tech to solve real-world problems, as well as providing them the opportunity to speak to a wide range of modern Tech companies all of whom are passionate about Science and Technology and its importance in our modern world.

Our students did us proud and all of them were particularly taken with the Cyber Crime challenges presented by an enthusiastic team of Police officers.

However, there was a number of activities and commercial companies that our students interacted with, from JVC to Thames Water and from Brunel University to The Bank of England.

Above is a construction challenge, whilst below is our students getting stuck into 3D printing. 

Our students also took part in interviews throughout the day as well as presenting their ideas to a large audience of peers and experts alike. they did not shy away from anything. In fact, the competition between them was fierce to be the ones to present their ideas to the room, a task which was finally met by these three below who took to it with their very own, unique, and entertaining style. It was hilarious and had me in tears and won them the "Best Pitch" certificate!

An enjoyable day was had by all, and significantly all the students who attended came away buzzing with the experience and knowledge they had gained.

Dr North

Last Week at Winston

Year 10 'Fit for Life'

Mrs Smith and Mrs Lyddon’s class have been doing “for for life” this week they have enjoyed toning their core, as well as having fun, using the large weighted hula hoops. Some of the girls have been able to replicate some fancy tricks with the hoops as well. The girls enjoyed this so much they insisted on an additional hula hooping lesson! This week Mrs Lyddon will be incorporating the hula hoops into her circuits, along with the introduction of dynobands!

Bletchley Park

On Friday the 18th of October, a group of Year 10 students had the opportunity to visit The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park (the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War).

Upon our arrival to Bletchley Park, we were given a brief introduction to the History of Computing. In this session, we were introduced to some of the first storage (e.g. magnetic tapes, floppy disks…) and electronic (e.g. first phones, typewriters…) devices. We then discussed how those devices evolved into the devices we use nowadays and what visible changes we could see.
As soon as we finished, the class was separated into two groups and the first tour of the museum begun. The first exhibit we were shown was the German Enigma machine (a machine used by the Germans to encrypt their messages- after being set up (the settings for the machine changed at midnight every day), the machine would encrypt every letter as any other letter) and a replica of the Turing-Welchman Bombe (the machine- designed and operated at Bletchely Park- used to decrypt the majority of intercepted German messages). The next exhibit was from the same time period as the Enigma and the Bombe. The Lorenz machine was built so Hitler would have an even more secure code to use for messages sent to and from his generals in the front lines. Kept in the same room was the Lorenz machine’s counterpart: The Colossus. The Colossus was built by Thomas H. Flowers to decrypt the Lorenz Machine Code. Next was the WITCH (the 15th computer built but the oldest surviving in the world) and a rebuild of the EDSAC built by a team of volunteers using the original blueprints. The next room featured some of the first computers held in people’s homes. The Elliot 803 (which was selling for £3 million) was one such computer. Another personal computer housed here is the ICH 2966 (which is about the size of a small room). The last personal computer in this room was the Elliot 903 (an improved version of the Elliot 803). At the end of our tour, we took a look at the first gaming machines (e.g. Commodore PET…) as well as early Portable Computers (e.g. the TOSHIBA T5200/100 – which weighed about 10kg; or the Apple Macintosh Power Book 170…). Then, we got a chance to try gaming on different devices (e.g. Atari…) held at the museum.

After lunch, it was time for us to engage in some hands-on activities. We did two different sessions: one on coding and one on AI. In the coding session, we had the chance to use the BBC Microbyte to encode a game of Snake using Basic. After we finished writing out the code, we then got to run the program and test our game. For the ones who took a liking to coding (or wanted to make their game more interesting), extra code was available to modify your game. The second session focused on Artificial Intelligence, or rather on whether it is possible for a machine to ever be emotionally intelligent enough to convince a human that they are interacting with another person rather than with a machine.

After a short discussion about our views and predictions on the advancement of Computing, we were introduced to our first activity- The Turing Test. In pairs, we sat at a Computer. We were then connected unto a network that would either pair us with another person in the room or with a computer. After that, a countdown started and through having a conversation, we had to determine whether we were talking to a person or a computer. This tied perfectly into the second part of the session: Chatbots. When we finished the Turing Test, we then had the chance to dissect the machines that some of us had been talking to. In pairs, we read through and altered the code of a Chatbot.

The trip was, overall, an amazing experience and gave many of us a chance to gain a deeper understanding of the history of Computing.