This half term has seen the return of after school opportunities for all Durrington High students which has been fantastic. Years 7, 8 and 9 have been enjoying performing arts clubs. Year 7 have been exploring musical theatre, learning songs and script extracts from The Lion King whilst year 8 have been taking part in a series of voice and movement workshops with Mr Hall to improve their acting skills and techniques. Year 9 have been looking at a whistle stop tour of GCSE Drama and BTEC Performing Arts to prepare them for September.
We are so excited to be able to offer our students the chance to develop their performance skills outside of lessons once again. It is also a great opportunity for them to build confidence and, of course, have fun. We have a strong tradition at Durrington of producing showstopping productions and offering our students multiple opportunities to perform throughout the school year. Whilst we have missed being able to do that this year, it’s great to be back giving our students opportunities to develop outside of their timetabled lessons.
The Computer Science Department has also offered opportunities to students in years 7 and 8 to explore their classroom learning further. Year 7 have been using Kodu to create their own games and year 8 have been working with Python.
This half term has been the first time our year 7 students have been able to access an (almost) full extra-curricular programme and they have had a varied and exciting choice. Debate club was hugely popular and it was great to see a regular attendance of over 40 students learning important debating skills and exploring important issues. Science club has also been very popular with around 55 students performing experiments including making electric playdough and exploding volcanoes each week. Year 7 students also had the option of joining Eco club and maths club.
Durrington High School is renowned for it’s sporting success and we have missed being able to play in county and national tournaments the past year. However, this half term we are so pleased to have been able to utilise our fantastic new facilities and offer a full summer sports programme of tennis, rounders, athletics and basketball across all year groups.
Year 7 creative writing club has also been a popular choice. Their first task was to come up with a new name for their anthology and they chose Swimming in Words, keeping to the seahorse theme. Their first stimulus was to write prose based on ‘A Day in the Life of……’ The excellent submissions have been published as an anthology which you can read here. We can’t wait to read the next one which will be mystery themed.
We are delighted to have been able to offer an extra curricular programme to our students once again. The range of enrichment opportunities we have is something we are very proud of at Durrington. Although we are not yet running a full programme of enrichment activities, it has been wonderful to see so many students engaging in what is on offer and we look forward to more opportunities next half term.
You can view the full clubs programme here.
