Crime and Punishment
Year 8: Jewish Holocaust Memorials
This half term as part of the Judaism module, Year 8 have been studying Anti-Semitism. As an example of Anti-Semitism, we have spent three lessons looking at the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust. We used the Windermere Children as a case study. As a focus, we explored how Jews became ashamed of their religion as a result of their experiences.
The year 8s were given the project of creating a Holocaust Memorial for Jewish people. They had to use their knowledge of the Jewish religion combined with their knowledge of the Holocaust, to make a suitable memorial which would help them feel proud of their religion. Their teachers were blown away with the careful thought and design which were put into their creations. We have some very talented, aspiring architects! We were so impressed with the memorials that we wanted everybody to have a chance to see the display of incredible work so we have step up a Holocaust memorial museum to showcase them. This allowed the students to see how religious knowledge could benefit them in a caREer.
Madam Raine’s Blooket Games
Here in the MFL team, we play lots of games in French and German to help us remember, recall and retrieve our vocabulary. Mrs Raine’s class have been extra competitive this year especially in Blooket. “Not your usual way to hold a laptop”, thought Mrs Raine! Year 7 students were retrieving vocabulary from Module 1 by playing Crypto Hack on Blooket. As you can see, those passwords were kept very safe indeed!
Mrs Gill, Curriculum Leader for MFL
Being a Foreign Exchange Student in France by Juliette R (Year 9)
I went on a foreign exchange to France for 3 weeks by myself and this is my experience:
At first, I wanted to go for 3 months but my parents didn’t want me away for so long, so I settled for 3 weeks instead. Although I speak a lot of French already due to my family, I was still a little nervous.
On the Wednesday of our May half-term, I joined my year group in France (Y10) which is the final year of High School there. The atmosphere was very different compared to year 9 and thankfully I got to sit out when they were doing exams! I had no idea how different it would be compared to an English school, but I felt that I adapted quickly, since everyone was so welcoming. It was a bit odd at first to have boys in my class, especially as some were clearly older due to having to repeat a year…or two!
There were many differences compared to PGHS such as no uniform, a different timetable, boys, the canteen food choices and many more. One of my favourite things about French schools was the timetable. It varied everyday so some days I would have less lessons than others. I started and ended at different times depending on the day (although some days I had lessons from 9 till 5pm with double lessons and only had 55 minutes for lunch). We also had free periods. On Fridays, we started at 11am, had one lesson and then went back home for lunch and back to school again for the afternoon.
I also loved wearing my own clothes to school; the dress code was so relaxed so I could feel confident in my own clothes. It was a life saver for when it was boiling hot as none of the classrooms had air conditioning.
There was one thing that I was glad to leave behind and that was having PE first thing for 2 hours on a Monday morning and occasionally on a Thursday morning! If that wasn’t bad enough, we had to play rugby with boys in that heat. It was not fun!
Living with a family who don’t speak English by myself at 14 is an experience in itself. It was odd at first and I felt very out of place but, after a couple days, Eva (the girl I was staying with) and I became super close friends and then it all felt normal living there!
This was such an amazing experience for me. I have no regrets and would 100% do it again!
Introducing Mr Briscoe
My name is Mr Briscoe. I am relatively new to the education sector. However, coaching and mentoring people is not new to me, as I have worked as a personal trainer and group exercise instructor for most of my working life. Regarding my linguistic background, I have been a passionate linguist for most of my life, with German being my focus and learning French and Spanish to varying degrees of proficiency. My love for German stemmed from a curiosity of the language and its culture. Subsequently, this curiosity led me to travel in and around Germany, Austria, Lichtenstein and Switzerland and meet some amazing people, who have become great friends. Finally, I am a father, as well as a huge Preston North End fan and a gym fanatic.
Stars of the Term
German Penfriend Letters
We have had a really successful year with our German partner school, Sickingen Gymnasium and have been exchanging letters and video calls with them this year. Mrs Gill’s Year 9 German class have received some fantastic letters from our friends in Landstuhl and we have returned some amazing letters, telling our friends about our Easter holidays and what we plan to do in the summer holidays. This has really helped improve our German but also find out interesting information about our German friends, their town and their culture. We look forward to continuing this partnership in 2023/2024.
Mrs Gill, Curriculum Leader for MFL
Summer Term News
What a busy year we have had! It started with our annual European Day of Languages with our bake off, competitions and interform quiz, followed by a joint trip to Germany with the technology team in October which was a great success. Our lessons then centred around the Berlin wall and celebrating the German reunification. The trip to the Manchester German Christmas markets then followed which was great fun and we had the chance to sample lots of cultural delights. After Christmas, we celebrated with Madame Raine’s French baking club and our annual Spelling Bee competition was a huge success with three of our students making it to the regional final. In recent months, we have had success with our translation bees and various competitions taking place in lessons. We also welcomed our new teacher, Mr Briscoe who is covering Mrs Ingram’s maternity leave.
Mrs Gill, Curriculum Leader for MFL
The Essence of Teaching for Mastery
Penwortham Girls’ High Mathematics Department work extremely hard ensuring that all students are taught through a mastery style approach. This is achieved in many ways but mainly from the department working collaboratively to ensure that they have a coherent curriculum and ‘mastery’ lessons. So, what does mastery look like for our students?
In the classroom
- Students are taught through whole-class interactive teaching, enabling all to master the concepts necessary for the next part of the curriculum sequence.
- In a typical lesson, the teacher leads back and forth interaction, including questioning, short tasks, explanation, demonstration, and discussion, enabling students to think, reason and apply their knowledge to solve problems.
- Use of precise mathematical language enables all students to communicate their reasoning and thinking effectively.
- If a student fails to grasp a concept or procedure, this is identified quickly, and gaps in understanding are addressed systematically to prevent them falling behind.
- Significant time is spent developing deep understanding of the key ideas that are needed to underpin future learning.
- Key number facts are learnt to automaticity, and other key mathematical facts are learned deeply and practised regularly, to avoid cognitive overload in working memory and enable pupils to focus on new learning.
Penwortham Girls’ High School is part of a collaborative network of schools, all on their mastery journey, led by Secondary Maths Mastery Specialists from Abacus NW Maths Hub. Mr McVey is a Mastery Advocate for Penwortham Girls’ High School and Mrs Bennett is a Secondary Maths Mastery Specialists and an Assistant Maths Hub lead.
One of the activities that the Maths Hub likes to encourage, is for advocates from other schools in the collaborative network to observe live mastery lessons.
Mr Henshaw (Secondary Maths Mastery Specialist and Assistant Maths Hub Lead) delivered a live mastery lesson to a Year 10 mathematics class at our school.
Teaching direct proportion using the directly proportional symbol ‘α’ is generally taught through a process. In this lesson, the teacher demonstrated how this topic could be taught through understanding and thinking mathematically. Students had some prior knowledge from their Physics lessons.
Students had the opportunity to work in pairs to generate pairs of numbers that were directly proportional to each other.
They then worked collaboratively to identify whether the ratio tables were in proportion or not!
Students then were introduced to the ‘GCSE’ styles of questions.
The lesson ended with understanding of what direct proportion on a graph looked like.
Year 10 did us proud with exemplar behaviour and excellent interaction with the teacher and their peers. Not many students can cope with being watched by another teacher, let alone 15 teachers from different schools!
Mrs Bennett, Secondary Mathematics Teaching For Mastery Lead
Year 9 Trigonometry
Recently 9F have been learning about trigonometry, specifically how to use it to calculate the lengths of sides of right-angled triangles. Mrs Bennett and Mr McVey have been trialling a new approach to teaching this topic, aiming to give the students a deeper understanding of the somewhat mysterious ‘sine’, ‘cosine’ and ‘tangent’ ratios.
Mrs Bennett introduced the concept, explaining how ancient mathematicians used the unit circle and stars in the night sky to develop the fundamentals of what we know today as trigonometry. The students also saw how lengthy tables of trigonometric values had to be used before the advent of the calculator. They certainly viewed their Casio ClassWiz in a new light after this!
From here, the students learned how to correctly label the sides of a right-angled triangle using the words opposite and hypotenuse. They then used the sine ratio to accurately calculate the length of these sides. In subsequent lessons, the cosine and tangent ratios have been explored with the adjacent side being brought into play. For the remainder of this unit of work, we will be looking at how to calculate the size of angles in the triangles and also at how this interesting branch of maths is used in real life.
Well done to all the students in 9F who approached their learning with great enthusiasm!
Mr McVey
Maths Department
