Yesterday, a group of Year 8 students joined with their counterparts from the Sacred Heart Language College in Harrow for the first of our Middle School Academic Partnerships. Indeed, this was the first event of its kind to be held since the start of the pandemic, and we are delighted that our long-standing and strong link with Sacred Heart has been made palpable again this week. The subject area was English, and the focus for the workshop was Shakespeare’s Henry V, and how it might be staged.
The day’s activities consisted of learning about the play’s plot and themes alongside the technical aspects of staging. With the help of glossaries and secondary material on character, themes and motifs, the students then applied what they were learning to video clips from various productions. Such comprehensive knowledge was then put to work in the preparation of group presentations, detailing just how they would handle the particular scene from the play they had been given. Naturally, much of the work centred around the powerful and enigmatic character of Henry himself. The presentations themselves were of an exceptionally high calibre with some being particularly scholarly in scope and tone, and it was clear that the groups were working both collaboratively, as well as independently from instruction.
The partnership day was rounded off by a session of intense minutes of coding, expertly led by our Year 12 mathematicians, from which the students went off happily knowing how to decipher ISBN codes for instance.
Our Year 8 students should be congratulated for the outstanding sense of academic maturity and application demonstrated.
