Elastic Band have been practising hard during their Tuesday morning sessions. Beginner players are always welcome!
Year 7 and 8 mountain biking club enjoyed a trip out to Letheringsett.
A group of pupils from Years 5, 6 and 7 have joined with Dr Rose to create a Gresham’s Green Team. They are aiming to help make the school an eco-friendlier place and have pledged to encourage pupils to turn off lights and waste less food, plant new trees around the school, organise a litter pick and create birdhouses.
“Nicholas McCarthy is a concert pianist specialising in left-hand repertoire, and Gresham’s School created a brilliant opportunity for him to visit our school and showcase his musical ability as well as share his backstory. Across the two-day visit, there is not a shadow of a doubt that Nicholas gained the greatest respect of all the pupils and staff of Gresham’s School.
On Friday 13th January, a selected group of musicians at Gresham’s were treated to a masterclass by Mr McCarthy and then he demonstrated left-hand repertoire with a performance. Some lucky pianists were given a one-to-one session with Nick to improve their piece of choice and how to enhance the performing aspect of playing the piano.
On Saturday 14th, Nick McCarthy gave an inspirational talk during the School Chapel Service and also demonstrated left-hand piano-playing. His talk was on the topic of his life story and how, even though he was born with one hand only, he decided, after seeing a friend play the piano at school, that he too would like to not only play the piano but become a concert pianist. Initially, he did not even have a piano, although he did get a keyboard for the following Christmas; he taught himself to play, and used Radio 3 as his inspiration and teacher. One day, his father told Nick to turn the radio down, and in fact it was Nick playing! This was when he knew he was good and he subsequently applied for multiple music colleges across the UK. He made history when he became the first one-handed pianist to graduate from the prestigious Royal College of Music in London. Ultimately the main takeaway from the talk was: no matter how many people put you down or discourage you, no matter what the obstacles standing in your way, nothing is impossible and no matter how crazy your dreams may be, you’ll be able to achieve them if you put the effort in.”
The pupils braved some very low temperatures to camp out in the school woods during a January weekend. They enjoyed a take-away curry, flame-grilled popcorn and a breakfast fry-up, as well as sleeping in the outdoor cabin’s hammocks. This was a great opportunity to develop resilience in both staff and pupils; a great time was had by all!
At the beginning of term, a group of 15 Year 7 & 8 pupils visited the Productivity East building at the University of East Anglia. During their visit they learned about what it takes to become a fully qualified engineer. They toured the building and were able to see a range of sophisticated equipment, used to do anything from 3D printing to milling components out solid blocks of metal and testing the stresses and strains on materials.
Carol Services
Gresham’s Prep and Senior Schools ended the term with a series of traditional Christmas Carol services in Chapel. The beautiful Christmas songs and Carols performed by our amazing Chapel Choirs provided the perfect end to the term, and a super start to our festive celebrations.
Nativity Services
On the final weekend of school this year our Prep and Senior pupils enjoyed a festive Nativity Service in Chapel. They had enormous fun singing Carols and watching a hilarious adaptation of the Nativity story written and performed by Year 12 pupils. The star of the show was Spice the Donkey who made a dramatic entrance into Chapel to help Mary and Joseph in their hour of need.
Year 7 Spanish have had a cultural interlude this week where they learnt a bit about Cuba and did some research into the history of Salsa (the dance, not the sauce). Then on Thursday they were treated to a salsa lesson with our fabulous dance teacher, Lucy, who had them all grooving and moving to the beat in no time. Olé!
We are delighted to announce that Gresham’s Prep School has been featured as a top 50 Prep School in the UK in The Cricketer magazine. It is a fantastic achievement to be featured after a thorough selection process, in which hundreds of schools sent in entries to be featured in the list. All entries were then judged against an extensive set of criteria, which included a compelling commitment to cricket in the curriculum, facilities, fixture programmes and coaching.
This is also telling of the hard work that our cricket teams put in to achieve results, which has payed dividends for both boys and girls cricket teams, who had impressive seasons last year. The Girls U13A and B teams ended their season last summer with wins against Wisbech Grammar School and Norwich School respectively, topped off with a win at the St Joseph’s College six-a-side tournament. The U13 boys team ended their season winning the County Cup. These are fantastic results for our Prep cricket teams and very promising looking towards next season.
Gresham’s sports fantastic facilities for our budding cricketers, who have the opportunity to develop their skills all year round with the use of the Bola Meryln indoor bowling machine. Cricket is the main sport for Boys and Girls in the Prep School in the summer term. The game is initially learned through the Kwik cricket format encouraging all players to develop batting, bowling, and fielding skills. As their skills develop, coaching builds towards pairs and T20 match formats with most players moving into the hard ball game in Year 5 or 6. Players are offered coaching throughout the year during activities sessions led by the school’s Director of Cricket, Chris Brown, and other cricket coaching staff.
Careers and the STEAM coordinator worked together to produce STEAM Week. It was a busy week with speakers, workshops, a Chapel talk, virtual Maths Challenge with F1 McLaren and a STEAM Careers Fair with 40 exhibitors including Lotus Cars, The Dyson Institute, the Armed Forces, the Quadram Institute and more.
The Sixth form Academic Enrichment talk was with Zoe Griffiths, from Think Maths https://think-maths.co.uk/ who gave a interactive talk on the Hidden Maths of Technology.
On Tuesday Zoe did a sequence of four Maths workshops on ‘Shapes and Smoke Rings’ which were attended in separate sessions for year 11, year 10, year 7 and outreached to pupils from Sheringham High School and Cromer Academy.
On Wednesday Blakely Clothing gave a Chapel talk to illustrate how the creative industry is part of STEAM, embracing design, manufacture, creativity, technology, logistics and sustainability.
Later on Wednesday F1 McLaren Aerodynamicist, OG Kunz Chow (W 2009 – 13) together with the F1 McLaren outreach team did a virtual maths and science challenge to show pupils how curriculum learning and mathematical theory is used with performance analysis. The pupils were given a challenge involving use of algebra, calculus, pie and trigonometry.
The STEAM Careers Fair celebrated and showcased a diverse variety of STEAM employment with 40 exhibitors representing Creativity, Design, Art, Engineering, Property, the Armed Forces, Software Engineering, Technology Design, Science, Agriculture, the Environment and Space.
All year 9-13 pupils attended with external schools bringing pupils from Alderman Peel High School, Aylsham High School, Sheringham High School and Cromer Academy.
Prep School pupils from years 7 & 8 attended and Parents were invited.
The learning outcome was for pupils to link STEAM subject learning to employment by finding out from exhibitors what their role is, how they got to where they are now and what skills and opportunities employers offer.
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