We had a super time exploring Meanwood Valley Trail and engaging in our natural surroundings. We used OS maps to mark key locations along the walk and enjoyed our leaf rubbings!

Many thanks for all your hard work this year – what an adventure we have all been on together. Well done and have a fab summer holiday!

Miss Davies x

What a fantastic time! Ice cream, exploring and discovering! We explored the site in small groups – discovering temples, fountains, castle ruins and unusual sculptures. Please see some highlights in the pictures below.

Over the last week, we have delved deeper into our Keith-Harring style pieces. We first began by practising our mark making once more. How could we express our emotions? How could we represent a memory? Both these questions came to the forefront as we put pencil-to-paper. Afterwards, we began drafting our designs on flipchart paper – with plenty of room to explore different concepts and redraft, they began to take shape.

Next, we copied our final designs onto large paper, then card, and began to cut out our designs. This was certainly a challenging process but we persevered and we enjoyed seeing our ideas finally come together!

Today, we had the pleasure of having a professional artist – Adrian Sestini – to share his tips and tricks for screen printing. Out came the paint! On went the aprons!

Gradually, our designs began to decorate the room on our tshirts! Some truly unique and fun designs appeared as we experimented using different printing styles and inks.

Yesterday, we began exploring different shapes and textures using a variety of media. Students began to reflect on their time at ACE, relating different shapes and lines to their memories. Some focused on memories from within school, while others reflected on trips throughout the years. Tropical World certainly seemed to be a source of inspiration!

Next, we began drafting and redrafting our designs, incorporating different Haring-style forms into our drawings. During this activity, we practised drawing proportional figures, incorporating our learning from the previous day. It certainly was a challenge, but after multiple drafts, our designs began to take shape!

This week, we began our Arts Fortnight – centered around the artist Keith Haring. The students enjoyed exploring how they could create figures inspired by Haring’s art works. We firstly began by using miniature mannequins to practice drawing a figure with accurate proportions. During this time, students experimented drawing the form in different poses and produced some fantastic initial sketches.

Afterwards, students posed in different positions outside and sketched around them using chalk. Once we were back inside, we had a go at drawing our partner’s live pose in our books.

To finish up our exploration of form, we recreated our drawings from earlier with Plasticine.

Although it was a little wet at times, we had an absolutely fantastic day on Friday. A big well done and thank you to everyone involved. It was a celebration not only of sporting talents, but of teamwork too.

This week, we began our music unit on ukuleles! Although our fingers were a bit sore from all the string work, we managed to learn three new chords and played along to ‘Ho Hey’ by The Lumineers.

We have also began listening to different musical works by Tom Misch. We have really enjoyed ‘South of the River’ this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEJk2FJJ18c

This week, we explored Billy Collin’s poem ‘Snow Day’. As an introduction, we had a go at arranging different lines from the poem. Each group managed to create a slightly different piece which we could draw meaning from. We discovered how powerful the ordering of phrases can be in altering the message and focus of a poem.

A special shout out to Majd and Noah for being our reflective Learners of the Week for their fantastic questions and challenge completion in Maths!

Our final week of half term was certainly adventurous! It began with opportunity for reflection on all the staff that have helped us with our SATs. Each of us wrote a thank you card to the various staff members that have helped us this year with our learning. Some students wrote multiple cards to staff ranging from our fantastic dinner ladies to our amazing pastoral support team.

For both groups, residential was a fantastic range of puzzles, games and activities. The Via Farrata, Gorge walking and caving certainly had us challenging ourselves!