Welcome to the new academic year – our latest blog is now live

http://sixsenses.edublogs.org

Please join us there…..

Just one more post to slip in before we sign off for the summer.

Today a small group of girls travelled to the Houses of Parliament to represent the school at the Girls Get Coding event.

Using ‘Kodu’ they taught MPs how to code a character in the game to eat apples, scoring points for each, and losing points every time their character bumped into an obstacle on screen.

Our local MP, Dominic Raab, was there and spent a considerable amount of time learning to use the program.

The girls carefully explained what he had to do in order to achieve the best possible score, and then presented him with a Certificate of Achievement to celebrate his hard work.

There were further coding challenges for the girls to complete, before a visit to the Supreme Court this afternoon rounded off an eventful day.

Dominic Raab has also written about the day on his blog which can be found here

http://domraab.blogspot.co.uk/

So we reach the end of this academic year – with a stunning exhibition of artwork (both 2D and 3D) with contributions by all pupils in the Prep School. Plus a couple of screens previewing the digital work too.

School has now broken up for the summer holidays.

Next year? – well check back here in early September if you want to know where we’ve next going….

Have a wonderful July and August

It was a really hectic day and whilst the time-lapse of the planting may be fun to watch, we’d still like you to see the garden our pupils built

Then there is the pond – which looks really good when filled with water and slate and surrounded by water plants. We even found this afternoon that bees were beginning to be attracted to our wildlife garden. A duck waddled past and for one moment we thought he was going to walk into our pond.. But no!

Once everything was in place it really looked fantastic! The boys checked that they could read the QR codes with information about the wildflowers, and also the quizzes they have written.

And here’s the finished garden – with work representing every class in the School.

Today was the day all the preparation, planning and hard work culminated in the planting of our actual 1m Square Budding Gardeners plot at RHS Wisley.

Here’s how the morning progressed :

Please remember to visit RHS Wisley over the next week (half-term week) and vote for our Milbourne Lodge Garden – there are voting cards available in the Library . Just select our ‘It’s a Wild World‘ garden for the ‘Peoples Choice Award’.

We’d love to think you chose our garden! There are more than 50 school gardens to view between now and Sunday June 1st.

RHS Wisley….Here we come. This is our 1m x 1m pallet ready to be planted for the RHS Wisley Budding Gardeners Competition. We have selected a small group of pupils to represent the school and they will spend tomorrow building the garden.

Today we found our pitch, and the accompanying panel outlining the details of our project. The theme for this year is recycling – and all the creatures and habitats pupils have created are made from recycled materials.

The garden will be planted with wildlflowers and herbs. Pupils will build the garden in the morning and judging will take place after lunch (Friday May 23rd)

Hadley Rousseau recently took a series of excellent photographs during a visit to RHS Wisley

Here are a small selection of those that he particularly likes

We were delighted to welcome Ross Targett and Hugh Collins to Milbourne Lodge for a series of coding workshops yesterday. Their Code Kingdoms game teaches Computer Science and programming in a way that’s fun for children, who design their own game levels with real JavaScript code. They can then share these levels with friends.

Ross and Hugh designed and wrote the game – which means they are uniquely positioned to deliver these workshops. It’s their concept, their design, their code.

Whilst our aim at school this year has been to balance the ‘Screen Time‘ and ‘Sky Time‘ in our lives we have to accept that pupils will be using computers, tablets and phones . It would be nice to think they will spend this time learning something educational – like Code Kingdoms.

3a and 3b were selected to participate in the two-hour workshop in the morning. This meant more pupils than computers – but we were delighted by how well they worked together in pairs.

At lunchtime younger pupils had the chance to contribute their own ideas to improve the game – we loved Sebastian’s suggestion that they should include characters to represent each Dr Who! Apologies for slighly blurred photo – but the boys were laughing so hard no one stood still long enough to take a clear picture!

After lunch U6 were also introduced to the game – and they too found it enormously engaging on a more ‘serious’ level.

We wish Hugh and Ross every success over the next few months (they’re off to California for some further development work as they prepare to release the next ‘secret’ version of the game!) and hope that they’ll be back for another workshop session in the Autumn?

Any Milbourne Lodge pupil who wants to know how to access the new Beta ‘Secret’ Version of Code Kingdoms – just come and ask me for the link!

Job well done.

Pupils in L6 were tasked to write a short Wildlife Words ‘dictionary’ for younger pupils in the school.

This we then published as a paperback book.

Here is a preview of a couple of the inside pages.

Ecologist, author and hedgehog expert Hugh Warwick spent today delivering a series of lectures to pupils during their Art and IT lessons.

He highlighted the rapid decline in the hedgehog population over the last decade (37%). Having outlined the main threats to hedgehogs in Britain, pupils explored possible ways in which they might be able to halt this drop in numbers.

Some of the teaching took place in the classroom, but we also took Hugh on a tour of our school grounds and showed him the nature trail we are developing.

He identified a number of potential sites where we would be most likely to encounter hedgehogs and also discussed how we might best photograph these nocturnal mammals.

This is Hugh with a ‘Real’ hedgehog, and his ‘stunt’ hedgehog

Pupils have put on a display in the foyer to exhibit some of the work they have created during their Art lessons to highlight Hedgehog Awareness Week

If you’d like to know more this is the website of Hedgehog Street