The Flagpole

Across the school home learning has continued with pupils continuing to work hard and engage well. In the History department History teacher, Abigail Adams, has been incredibly impressed by:

Jimmy Frazier in Year 8 produced a super piece of work on Recruitment In WWI - he showed a good understanding of propaganda and excellent insight into the positives and negatives of the PALS Battalions. 

Theo Knight also in Year 8 included fantastic detail on his trench warfare worksheet, really impressing his teacher. Well done Theo! Trench Warfare Worksheet

Dylan Williams in Year 7 took on the challenging task of writing an acrostic poem on the positives and the negatives of becoming a nun in medieval times. Not only did Dylan write poems on both he also cleverly included humour. Acrostic Poems

Ally Forinton also in Year 7 produced and amazing Castle project on Kenilworth Castle. In particular he analysed his sources really well. Castle Project

James Gallagher smashed his end of year essay on: 'Are UK's main political parties becoming increasingly ideologically similar?' The second and third paragraphs really reflect well on the ideology of and manifesto promises made by the political parties in the 2019 election. James will receive a Da Vinci for his excellent essay. Political Parties Essay

Over the past Half Term there have been many excellent example of work across the school, so much so that Mrs Pascoe-Williams is now putting together a special edition of the Pinnacle that will showcase and celebrate pupils' home learning efforts.

Lower Sixth Form Art students have produced some sophisticated work while in lockdown, including exceptional studies exploring different themes.

Claudia Tyler has been looking at the way in which we view the female form and examining issues around body image. Inspired by Jenny Saville she has explored how, in being dissatisfied by what we may see in the mirror, we may try to morph our faces into grotesque poses in an attempt to, ironically, change our appearance for the better.

Keeley Jarrett has been looking at the theme of 'Contrasts' which has led her down the path of considering contrasting light in portraiture and also contrasting emotions. Her self-portraits in different media are inspired by the angst found in the work of Kathe Kollwitz.

Sebastien Shaw has investigated the theme of 'Rituals'. This portrait is a result of his exploration into various psychological disorders including Pica, a compulsive eating disorder in which people eat non food items with no nutritional value.

It is all original and thought-provoking work, as I am sure you will agree.

Firstly I wish to thank you for all of the support for the home learning programme that you have been providing to your child/children.

I am writing to let you know about a new home learning support resource we have put in place for all of the pupils at Princethorpe College in order to help them to make the most of home learning and to be able to use our home learning platform, Microsoft Teams, as effectively as possible.

This new resource is the Pupil Home Learning Guides channel, which is available on our internal video service, Microsoft Stream, and contains a wide range of support videos, explaining how to use a number of features on Teams and Office 365 on both PCs and mobile devices. As an internal service, the pupils must be signed into their Princethorpe accounts to access this, but for your reference the link to the channel is below. I have also attached a contents list, with links, of the videos currently available. The pupils were informed of this new resource on Friday afternoon, and so already have access to this.

Pupil Home Learning Guides channel (requires pupil Princethorpe account sign in)

I hope that you and your children find this a useful resource to help with the technical aspects of home learning. We will be adding further content to this channel over the coming days and weeks, including providing videos specific to accessing and completing online tests for the upcoming assessment week. 

Please also be advised that many other useful documents and resources are available via the Home Learning 2020 section on My School Portal, available here.

Kind Regards

Andy Compton
Assistant Head (Director of Digital Strategy)